Tip of the Week

Get to the Root of the Problem. (Adapted from Monday, July 20 blog.)

Sometimes Small Things Are Big Things

I was coaching a player a couple days ago who tended to start his forehand loop drive with his upper body. This is a common problem, and leads to players "muscling" the ball, i.e. straining to create power with just their upper body. Large players often get away with this, as they can create sufficient power this way, but it means straining, which means they lose control as well as having only good power instead of great power. It also invariably leads to injuries.

But telling a player who strokes with just his upper body to use his lower body (legs, hips, waist) doesn't usually work. It's a big change, and incorporating all those lower body movements into a nice, smooth stroke throws the timing off, leading to all sorts of problems. What to do?

They key is to start small. Just have the player use a little lower body to get the upper body started. Once this is done, it all starts to fall into place – as it did here. After a few minutes the player was smoothly ripping shot after shot as I fed him multiball.

Non-Table Tennis: What I Did on My Vacation

Alas, I need one more day before I start blogging again. Stuff piled up while I was away and my todo list is currently holding me in a headlock and threatening to break my paddle if I don't attend to its needs. I'll start up again tomorrow - I put that on the todo list. Now, let's see what's next on the list . . . and then this . . . oh shoot, I think I forgot about this one . . . .

Last Blog Until Tuesday, August 4 Wednesday, August 5, and the Capital Area Team League

I'm going on vacation! When most people go on vacation, that means the beach, camping, an amusement park, or something like that. Me? I go to an annual science fiction & fantasy writing workshop in Manchester, NH – The Never-Ending Odyssey (TNEO). It's for graduates of the six-week Odyssey Writing Workshop – I went in 2006. This will be my sixth TNEO. I leave very early on Friday morning. (On a side note, I hurt my shoulder in a coaching session yesterday and had to have Coach Raghu substitute the rest of that session, and I'm taking today off as well, so maybe I need the rest.)

And if you live in the Capital area (Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia), don't miss the Capital Area Team League segment below – deadline to enter the Fall season is Sept 7.

Status Report

This seems like a good time to give a status report on all the things I promised to do when I was elected six months ago in January to a four-year term on the USATT Board of Directors – so I'm 1/8^th of the way through my term. (I'm one of nine members.) I ran on five big issues, and 12 smaller ones – see my Election Page, where I talk about each, including the goals of each, and a link to where I blogged extensively about each one. (Much of the below refers to what I wrote on the Election page.) Let's go through them, one by one, and check the status. (Note that this is all volunteer – I don't get paid a cent.) One complication is that I'm very busy in the summer as a coach, since kids are out of school, so I can't do as much from June-August. I'll be a lot busier starting in September.

FIVE BIG ISSUES

Ogi: The Life of Ichiro Ogimura by Mitsuru Jojima, translated to English by John Senior

I recently read the English translation of this book, which covers the life of perhaps the most influential person in table tennis history. Suffice to say it was a fascinating read. (It was also a great resource for my own table tennis fantasy novel, The Spirit of Pong, which features two chapters where the wannabe American trains with the spirit of Ogimura.)

Ichiro Ogimura of Japan was perhaps the most driven table tennis player in history, and then he became perhaps the most driven coach and then most driven ITTF official in history. He started late, at age 16, but was so single-minded in his training that by age 22 he won the first of his two Men's Singles titles at the Worlds (1954 and 1956). He also won Men's Doubles twice, Mixed Doubles three times, and led Japan to five straight World Men's Team titles. The book chronicles this and everything else about him in great detail, giving both the facts and the spice of his life.

USATT Board Teleconference

The USATT Board of Directors had a teleconference last night, starting at 7PM Eastern Time and lasting about 70 minutes. As one of the at-large members, I was on the call. Alas, only five of the nine board members were able to make the call – me, Peter Scudner, Anne Cribbs, Ed Hogshead, and Kagin Lee. But five of nine is a quorum, and so the meeting went as scheduled.

I spent perhaps an hour preparing for the meeting – going over the draft of the minutes of the previous meeting and suggested changes, and going over the budget figures from the Audit Committee Report. All looked fine. However, the real time-taker were a pair of two-hour phone calls, one before and one after the teleconference. One was with another USATT official where went over everything about USATT; the other was a more local call about everything about MDTTC, the club I coach at. So basically everything that could possibly be of importance to anyone was discussed on those phone calls. And I still managed to finalize the new MDTTC Newsletter, spend an hour organizing my notes on upcoming USATT plans, and cross off nine other things on my todo list.

Technically, except for a short closed session (to discuss a certain disciplinary matter regarding a member who had apparently done naughty things), the meeting was "open," and I could write all I want about it. But I don't feel comfortable doing that, where as soon as I get off the call I start writing about it, in competition with USATT itself, which also gives out such news. So as in the past, I'll wait until they publish the actions/votes, which should go online in a few days. The actual minutes, which are far more detailed, don't go up until they are approved, which will likely happen on August 22, at the in-person meeting in Chicago. But the gist of the meeting:

Tip of the Week

The Tricky Side of Table Tennis.

Get to the Root of the Problem

One of the things that always exasperates me is coaches or players who try to fix problems by fixing the symptoms. In many ways, this is what separates a good, experienced coach from, say, a top player who knows proper technique but isn't that experienced in coaching it. When you've coached over 35 years (yikes, that's me!), and pay attention, you learn all sorts of things.

Here's an example. Recently I've coached several players who tend to fall back as they loop forehands. The "simple" solution, of course, is to tell them to focus on rotating around and forward into the ball, i.e. "don't fall back." And I've seen coaches try this many times, and it doesn't work – because they are treating a symptom of a problem rather than the root of the problem. The real question is why is the player falling backwards – and the answer almost every time is that he's too far from the ball, with his left leg too far from the table. And so he's forced to reach a bit forward. The falling back is to keep his balance. Solution: Have the player stand closer to the ball, with the left leg closer to the table. Then he'll have a natural rotation into and through the ball, with no falling backwards and off balance afterwards.

Illegal Hidden Serves

As I've blogged a number of times, cheating is rampant in our sport when it comes to serving. At the higher levels, over half of matches involve a player hiding his serve, i.e. cheating. Here's what I wrote about this two days ago, after the U.S. Open:

"Once again I came away from a major tournament disgusted at all the cheating – in particular, players hiding serves. Why do they do it? Because it helps them win and they get away with it. They may fool the umpires, who aren't sure if the serve is hidden (which is synonymous with saying the serve is illegal, but that's the least enforced rule in table tennis), but they don't fool coaches and experienced players, who know who the cheaters are. It's common at the world-class level, of course, but that was also true of, say, steroids. Does that mean we should copy those who cheat? I have no objection to someone hiding their serve if their opponent does it first and the umpire doesn't call it. It's the ones who do it first, with the sole intent of winning by cheating, that disgusts me. A player I coached lost two matches because of this cheating – learning to return them is going to become a major part of his training. (Note that few players hide the serve every time. The norm is to use border-line serves early on, to numb the umpire to such serves, and pull out the hidden ones several times a game and at key points at the end. I have video and still pictures showing many of these players hiding their serve.)"

Forehand Pendulum Serves

There are four primary reasons the forehand pendulum serve is by far the most popular serve among top players.

First, it's easy to hide contact (illegally) – I've blogged about this a number of times, and won't go into that here. (The solution? As I've proposed, require that the ball be visible throughout the serve to the opponent – as is currently required – and the entire net and its upward extension. The net posts are considered part of the net.)

Second, it's very easy to produce great spin and variation with the serve.

Third, every generation of up-and-coming players copies the previous generation of top players, and since the forehand pendulum serve was the most popular serve among the previous generation, the new generation copies it.

Fourth, it allows players the option of doing a reverse pendulum serve, which gives the opposite sidespin. You can also do this sidespin with other serving motions, such as backhand or tomahawk serves, but when you do that you are pretty much announcing to your opponent which type of sidespin you will be using. (You can, of course, develop reverse backhand and reverse tomahawk serves, but they are trickier and few do this.) It's probably easier to set up for a forehand pendulum serve and be ready to serve with either type of sidespin than with any other serving motion.

Tip of the Week

Change, and the Definition of Insanity. (Originally I was going to skip this week, but this Tip just jumped into my head, and so I wrote it.)

US Open

As usual, it was a busy week at the US Open, July 6-11 in Las Vegas. I spent my time coaching MDTTC players, but can't go into details on that – opponents might be reading this! Here's a rundown.

US Open

I just got back on Sunday from the US Open, and my todo list is now roughly one googol long. I was up nearly all night working on various table tennis projects, and this morning things keep coming up. (Plus I have to leave to coach shortly.) So this'll be a short blog, except for the links below, which are the best of the best from the last twelve days since my last blog before the US Open. (I'll start up with Tips of the Week again next Monday. I changed my mind - I'll have a new one tomorrow morning.) I'll blog about the US Open a bit tomorrow. Here are results, and here's a US Open Review, and here's USATT coverage:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4
• Day 5
• Day 6

100 Days of Table Tennis

Here's the new book by Samson Dubina. (Disclosure: I edited the book for him and did the forward.) Here's where you can buy it on Amazon. I'll likely blog about this more extensively later when I have time.