Tip of the Week
Clean Your Racket.

Saturday Coaching at Cassels Giant Round Robin
I spent Saturday at SmashTT in Virginia at the Cassels Giant RR, coaching one of my students, 14-year-old Sameer Shaikh. Here's the tournament write-up and results, care of Director Michael Levene, who also runs and coaches at SmashTT. Sameer is featured in the writeup. The tournament ran well, and we had a great time! 

Sameer went in rated 1528, and looking for the breakthrough that he's been on the verge of for many months. The first step was getting into a good division. The format started with groups of four, with the top two going to Division A (two groups of ten players), and the next two to Division B. Sameer was seeded third, and so seeded for Division B. He faced a 1613-rated player to get into Division A. Complication #1 was that the player had short pips on the backhand, something Sameer wasn't used to playing. (How the sport has changed…) But with a few adjustments for these quick, dead shots, and a focus on keeping the ball deep (that's key when playing non-inverted surfaces), he won the match 3-1, and so advanced into Division A – where he'd be the lowest rated player. In fact, other than a 1650 player (122 points higher), the next lowest was 1813. So began his nine matches in Division A.

Things did not start well – in fact, after four matches, I was rather worried he was in for a disastrous day with his 0-4 start. Two of them were somewhat meaningless, against the top two seeds (both over 2200). Then he lost to an 1813 player who he had recently beaten at the MDTTC league. It was a match he thought he could win, so it was hard to get over it.

USATT National Coaching Program Update
Here's the USATT news item on these big changes to our national team coaching system. If you are interested in applying as a coach for one of the National Teams – I believe these would include Men, Women, Junior Boys, Junior Girls, Cadet Boys, Cadet Girls, Paralympic - you need to apply by this Monday. I'll blog about this probably next week. (I'm putting this first because of that deadline. I may move this down later on.)

USATT Board of Directors Minutes and Illegal Hidden Serves
Our long national nightmare is over . . . the minutes to the USATT Board Meeting at the USA Nationals in December is finally up – four months later! So are the minutes to USATT Board Teleconferences in January and April. They are all linked from the USATT Minutes page.

Readers of this blog and anyone who's been paying attention to the sport knows about the problem we're having with illegal hidden serves. Our sport has developed a culture of cheating, where umpires allow players to illegally hide their serves, making receive very difficult, and giving the cheating player a big advantage. (Yes, hiding your serve to gain unfair advantage is cheating, and if you don't see that, you are in denial.) Nearly every major title at the USA Nationals, U.S. Open, and major events around the world are decided by illegally hidden serves. Because players cannot fairly compete when the umpire allows an opponent to hide their serves, nearly every top player, and now nearly every top cadet (under age 15) has been forced to learn to cheat hide their serve.

Rather Rare Shots
Yesterday in a coaching session with 14-year-old Matt, while practicing forehand counterlooping, I sidespin looped one extra wide to his forehand, drawing him out wide as it broke to the left (his right). He counterlooped, I counterlooped back to his middle forehand, and he was out of position - so he improvised and ripped (!) an inside-out backhand counterloop from the forehand side! The ball shot out to my wide forehand, curving away from me for an ace. I've seen the shot before, but only rarely - but very rarely, if ever, this fast, and with so much breaking sidespin. I dropped my racket in shock and told Matt that he had reached the pinnacle of his life, that for the rest of his life nothing he ever did would ever be at such a high level so that his life was now ruined, with nothing left to look forward to. (At the end of the session he insisted on trying the shot again, so we did a drill where he "practiced" the shot, and he pulled off two more, though not as good as the first one.)

I've played 40 years, and I've done almost the same shot - but not with speed, just a spinny but soft inside-out backhand counterloop. Now I have something to look forward to trying to do!

It got me thinking about other rarely used shots. Here are a few. 

20 Things to Harp On
Here are some things I constantly harp on with students.

Trickshot Routine
Note to self: never, Never, NEVER spend an hour practicing a very physical trickshot routine (for the next ITTF Trickshot Competition) unless you are physically in great shape, and never attempt this at the age of 56. Oops, I just turned 56, AND I practiced a trickshot routine for an hour on Sunday night. Double oops.

I believe the next trickshot competition will be this fall, so I'm getting ready. I've worked out a top-secret routine that involves all of my best trick shots in one strange medley – balancing the ball in the air by blowing on it (sideways), tossing a ball in the air and smacking it in mid-air with another ball, backspin serve that comes back over the net, smacking objects from a distance, and the infamous 50-foot serve (from the side of the table, so the ball bounces on both sides). The problem is that the routine happens so rapidly that it's pretty physical – and you'd be surprised how tiring it is to do these same shots over and over. And then we get to the 50-foot serve – now that is exhausting. Near the end of the hour I couldn't actually do it anymore as my arm was just too tired, and I couldn't make the distance. So I continued practicing, but only faked the 50-foot serve for a time, though I got back to doing it at the very end.

Tip of the Week
Shot Awareness in Practice.

Chinese School Exhibition
On Saturday I did an exhibition/demonstration at a Chinese school at Rocky Hill Middle School. My partner for the exhibition was Lisa Lin, rated 1919, a member of the USA Hopes Team (top four under 12 at time of trials), who had just turned 12. I'd spoken to her briefly on Friday about what we'd do, since it was her first exhibition, and pointed out that between the two of us we'd done about 500 exhibitions. 

I gave my usual talk about table tennis being a game of strokes, footwork, and spin; how it was an Olympic sport; and emphasized how China dominates, since it was a Chinese school. We demonstrated forehands, backhands, footwork, and a multiball demonstration where Lisa did lots of footwork. I also explained spin, and demonstrated a backspin serve that bounced back into the net, and a sidespin serve where I served to the left, and the ball spun sideways and hit a conveniently placed paddle off to the right. 

Then I got into my "sad story" routine, where I explained how a terrible thing had happened, that after years of training, Lisa had gotten a "big head," had gotten conceited - and in fact had told me that very morning that she could beat me!!! So to settle it once and for all, we were going to have a challenge match, with the loser sweeping and mopping the gymnasium that night. 

Thursday Beginning Junior Class
We started a new seven-week session of the Thursday class, which is 6-7 PM – though in reality we tend to go an extra 20 or so minutes each time, since the kids are so enthusiastic and it's my last coaching of the day, so I'm free. The new session has a small group of just seven, including two returnees from last session, but it's already looking like one of the best groups to work with. It's also a somewhat older group than in the past, ranging from 11 to 15. But all seven are gung-ho about table tennis – not a slacker in the group!

When I say "slacker," that means two types of players that can really hurt a group session. One is the type who doesn't really want to play, doesn't want to be there, treats it like work, and keeps asking, "How much longer?" The other is the goof-off, who won't take anything serious, and refuses to try or learn – they just smack balls around however they want to. Both of these types can hurt the group as their behavior can spread to others.

But there are no slackers in this group!

Six of the seven have obviously played some before, and knew how it was supposed to be played – they all could hit decent forehands and backhands. One is more of a beginner, playing "basement" style where he mostly patted the ball back with his backhand; forehands were a novelty for him. But he's picking it up.

MDTTC Media Coverage and the Washington Post
Since 2012 I've been keeping careful track of MDTTC media coverage, with 54 different items. (We've been open since 1992, and I have a huge folder of media coverage from before 2012, but not online.) I send out regular press releases; every club should have someone sending out periodic press releases to generate media coverage. 

Even though we're an hour away, we get pretty good coverage from the Baltimore Sun, with twelve items, including five in the past two months. But the thing that jumps out to me is that lack of coverage by the Washington Post. The Maryland Table Tennis Center is in Gaithersburg, which is part of the DC Metropolitan Area – we're about 15 miles north of DC. And yet since 2012 we've only had four items in the Post, two in 2012, one in 2014, and one in 2015. What's wrong with them??? Don't they realize table tennis is [we'll get to this part].

On Tuesday night I wrote two press releases, one about the Hope Trials in Canada (MDTTC girls Tiffany Ke and Lisa Lin finished third and fourth), and about the MDTTC Open this past weekend. As usual, the Baltimore Sun did a feature on them. But the Post? Not a word. This is especially aggravating as I've been reading the Post since I was a kid, and I still get daily delivery.

So I wrote a third item, a letter I emailed to Washington Post Sports. Here is the letter. I'll let you know if there's a response.

Dear Washington Post Sports,

I’d like to call your attention to the lack of coverage of the sport of Table Tennis in the Washington Post. I understand the bulk of your coverage will go to sports like football, basketball, and baseball, but consider this:

USATT Teleconference
Last night we had a USATT board teleconference from 7-9PM. Here's a very rough synopsis of what we went over. Other than approval of minutes of past meetings (items #3 and 4), no votes were taken.

Energized vs. Non-Energized, Back Problems, and Todo List
There are really two types of energy in table tennis – physical and mental. The mental often overpowers the physical. I sometimes think I'm tired (physically) roughly 90% of the time, but you simply have to overcome that mentally. But a lot of it depends on who you are coaching or hitting with, or what you are working on.

When coaching or playing an energized player who is trying hard, you get energized. When paired with an uninterested player, you lose energy. When working with a kid who has no interest and is constantly asking "How much longer?", or who simply goofs off constantly, you have absolutely no energy, and feel like a black hole of lethargy. (All coaches have faced that.)

When working on something that I'm really interested in – in particular coaching or writing projects – I tend to be more energized. When working on projects like setting up the Maryland State Championships – well, it's exciting to have one, but the actual work in setting it up is a bit non-energizing. Sometimes when I find myself working on something that's "important," but will take up a lot of hours that few if anyone will ever know happened, it's a bit non-energizing. (That describes most USATT work!) Maybe that's why I sometimes put my todo list in my blog (see below)? There's also the problem of helping out thankless people, where you spend a lot of time helping someone out, and they just take it for granted. (I could go into a rant on that, but won't.)