Tip of the Week
Top Ten Guidelines for Playing the Unconventional Style.

USATT Board Meeting
This past weekend I attended the USATT board meeting at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Sept. 21-23. (I attended both as a member of the board and as chair of the coaching committee.) Friday was travel day, plus an informal dinner at the OTC dining hall. I flew on the same flight as USATT legal counsel Dennis Taylor. Others attending the meeting included fellow board members Anne Cribbs (chair), Rajul Sheth, Ed Hogshead, Carolyn Savini, and Erica Wu (who just took a job at Facebook), with Gary Schlager and Tara Profitt attending via e-conference. Also attending were USATT CEO Gordon Kaye, COO Mark Thompson, High Performance Director Jörg Bitzigeio, and High Performance Committee Chair Carl Danner. Also attending for a few hours were new USATT employees Chris Mauro (accounting) and Tammy Kuyper (administrative assistant).

The meeting started at 9AM on Saturday. First on the agenda were formalities - roll call and call for any conflicts of interest. Then came approval of the minutes of our August teleconference - there were no substantive changes, though I did point out a missing period, which was duly added - my great contribution. The minutes were approved unanimously.

Tip of the Week
Development of an Outrageously Great Spin Serve.

New Format at the U.S. Open
Here's the 2018 U.S. Open page, and here's the entry form. It will be held Dec. 16-22 in Orlando, FL, near Disneyworld. (Yep, I'm going afterward, probably with a group of our juniors.)

Two huge pluses are 1) Every match will be played on rubberized floors (no more cement!), and 2) Did I mention it's near Disneyworld? The entry form includes discounts for Disneyworld, Universal Orlando, and Universal's Islands of Adventure, all nearby.

However, the format for the Open itself has changed. Before going further, I recommend you browse over the entry form, and then read the FAQ page. Really - it explains a lot! It's not that complicated once you read things over. And note that this is just for the Open; the Nationals in July will stay with the previous format.

The first thing you'll notice is that the format has changed - a lot. Instead of rating events, there's a Tiered Rating event. In this, you play not one, not two, but THREE round robins, with groups of mostly five, and then there's the single elimination state. (See page 3 of entry form, "Performance Track - Event 73.") There's also a Tiered Rating Doubles event, where you play in two round robins before the single elimination state.

Tip of the Week
Develop Ball Control by Playing with Different Surfaces.

Shortened Tables
There seems to be an obvious way to develop great players that we're almost all missing. Because of the height of the table - 30 inches - kids can't really play until they are about five or six years old, and even then it's rather awkward. (It's especially hard hitting backhands at that age, until their elbow is over the table.) However, there are many stories about how top players started playing much younger, as young as two or three, on shortened tables. They then move to regular tables around six or seven. 

For example, the Japanese whiz kid, Tomokazu Harimoto, who is world #8 (and #6 last month) at age 15, started when he was two years old. Here's video of him playing on a shortened table, where he's at most three years old. (Video should take you ten seconds in, where you see this for about six seconds.) Is it any wonder how good he became? I've seen others start this way as well. I once hit 50 forehands in a row on a one-foot table with Barney J. Reed when he was three years old, who would go on to be a many-time U.S. team member. He'd obviously been playing for a while, probably starting at two.

Tip of the Week
The Flat Smash That Isn't.

USATT League Ratings as Initial USATT Ratings
Below is a proposal I made a few days ago to the USATT Tournament Committee about using USATT League ratings as initial ratings for tournament. I think it's self-explanatory. Note that both regular USATT ratings (i.e. tournament ratings) and league ratings are in the USATT database, and both are in each player's profile when you look up their rating in the USATT ratings page. In the August Open I ran recently we had three "unrated" players who had league ratings that could have been used - but instead, we had to treat them as unrated players, so they could only play in the preliminaries of rating events.

Dear USATT Tournament Committee,

The USATT League is rather widespread, with (I'm told) more rated matches every month than tournament matches. Many clubs, including mine (MDTTC) have many players with extensive and accurate league ratings but no tournament rating yet. (We have USATT Leagues three times/week.) When they want to play their first tournament, they are stuck as unrated players even if they have an accurate league rating. The two systems are essentially the same. When I co-founded the system many years ago one of the goals, once it was widespread enough, was for it to be used as an initial rating in USATT tournaments, so players could play (and advance) in the appropriate rating events. I believe we reached that stage several years ago.

Today's Labor Day, so I'm off today - I plan to spend the day reading in bed! Blog and Tip of the Week will go up tomorrow by noon or else I don't get to be part of NAFTA, Google gets to continue their biased coverage of me, and I won't get invited to any weddings or funerals. 

On a side note, if you have newly tried to register, there might be a delay. For nearly eight years I've managed spam by requiring all those who register to mention "table tennis" in their registration. I'd get about ten a day and quickly go through them. However, in the last few days I've received over 600 spam emails. There are likely a few legitimate ones mixed in, but it's too many for me to go through one by one. For technical reasons I haven't been able to set up a proper spam filter here yet with Drupal. 

Tip of the Week
Never Think About Winning or Losing While Playing - Excise the Thought and Play Well!

How's Your Backhand Attack?
I've never had a strong backhand attack, relying instead on consistency and a strong forehand. It worked when I was younger and fast enough to cover much of the table with my forehand - though I'd have been better if I'd a better backhand attack - but now that I'm an eensy, wheensy, tiny bit older (um, 58), that doesn't work anymore. I can and do a backhand loop, but during my playing career it was more of a variation I'd throw at players. I actually developed my backhand loop more as a coach so I could demonstrate it. In practice, I actually have a pretty good backhand loop against backspin now.

Back in the days when I was developing a common slogan was, "One gun is as good as two." This meant that if you developed your forehand and footwork, having a strong backhand attack wasn't necessary. In fact, during those years there were a lot of style confrontations as one-winged attackers played two-winged attackers. The one-winged attacker often won, but these days the game has gotten faster and faster (even at the intermediate level, due to faster, bouncier sponges), and you really need to be able to attack from both wings, especially if you are an up-and-coming player. Some established players, especially in the senior ranks, don't really attack against backspin much on the backhand, and mostly block or "punch" their backhands in rallies; Dave Sakai and Charlene Liu have been piling up senior titles for years with just push and block backhands.

Tip of the Week
How to Quadruple Your Chances of Winning Those Five-Game Matches.

Hidden Serves - the Ma Long Serve
I've recently gotten into some discussions about Ma Long's serve. He's the reigning World and Olympic Champion, and while his world ranking has dropped to #7 due to lack of competition (plus his recent loss at the Bulgarian Open to Liam Pitchford), he's still generally considered the best player in the world.

But the simple reality is that he, like many other world-class players, rarely serves legally. Most of his serves are forehand serves where he throws the ball high and towards him, and as it comes down, he thrusts his head forward and down. The ball illegally goes behind his head, and he contacts it behind his chin, so the opponent can't see contact. Then his racket follows the ball, making it appear that he contacts the ball below the head. That's one of the main advantages of this technique. 

But ask yourself this - why would he and so many other top players spend so much time developing such an obviously illegal serve, where they have to bend their body into a pretzel, throw the ball behind their head, and do that vigorous head thrust just before contact, and then let the receiver see contact?

Here's the key rule on hidden serves - I've bolded the key parts.

2.6.4 From the start of service until it is struck, the ball shall be above the level of the playing surface and behind the server's end line, and it shall not be hidden from the receiver by the server or his or her doubles partner or by anything they wear or carry.

Tip of the Week
Make Up-and-Coming Players Your Rivals - and Stay With Them!

USATT Board Teleconference
The teleconference started at 7PM and went until about 8:20 or so. (I'm on the USATT board of directors.) Ignoring formalities, there were three main segments.

1) USATT High Performance Director Jörg Bitzigeio gave a High Performance Update, which mostly covered recent USATT training camps and ranking tournaments. As I've noted before, the level and depth of play among our up-and-coming juniors is easily the best in modern history, i.e. since the hardbat era. (My club is helping - we had three of the four semifinalists in Under 10 Boys at the recent USA Nationals, and two of them - including the winner - is off today for two weeks training and competing in France, which finishes with the European Mini-Championships, Aug. 24-26. Here's the info page, but alas, it's in French.)

2) A long discussion of our upcoming in-person meeting in Colorado Springs, Sept. 21-23, where went over logistics and the agenda. Major topics that will be included:

I'm postponing the blog one day so I can include coverage of the USATT Teleconference scheduled for Monday night at 7PM. See you tomorrow!

Tip of the Week
Training the Subconscious.

Top Ten Surprising Thing About Top Table Tennis Players
Top table tennis players can often seem a different species than the rest of us. After all, they have powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men! Here are ten things about top players that might surprise you.