The Forehand Loop: Chinese vs. European Theory

The forehand loop is often taught differently by Chinese and European coaches, though there is, of course, a lot of overlap. The general Chinese theory is that the loop is an extension of the drive, and so you focus first on the forehand drive. When that's very strong, then you extend the backswing and learn to graze the ball, and you have a loop. The general European theory is that they are two very distinct shots, and the loop is often taught very early.

Kids who focus on hitting early on (and generally develop strong blocking games as well) tend to get better early, while those who focus on looping early on seem to catch up when they are bigger and have enough power. If the hitter gets stuck mostly hitting and blocking, the loopers tend to pass them. If the hitter develops a big loop and learns to use it, well, that's almost the definition of a top Chinese player. Meanwhile, players who learn to loop early on but never really develop their table game (especially blocking) often get stuck at a level because of this hole in their game. 

Losing weight

Losing 17 pounds seems to have made me a better player. How 'bout that! People keep asking me how I lost 17 pounds in two months. Basically I did it by snacking constantly! Yes, from morning to night, whether I'm hungry or not, I keep snacking . . . on celery, carrots, cabbage, and tomatoes. When it was meal time, I wasn't that hungry. I also stopped drinking ice tea and went with plain water. I also tried to get exercise, mostly through table tennis and a few shadow practice sessions each week - I keep a weighted racket at my desk. (Good for practicing forehands and braining intruders.)

***

Send us your own coaching news!

Table Tennis Chats

Sometime after the Cary Cup Championships (March 18-20), I'm going to ask in my blog and on the forum who would attend. Assuming there is enough interest, we'll have a test chat, and then I'll start scheduling guests - coaches and top players.

Ping-Pong and third baseman J.J. Hardy of the Baltimore Orioles

Yep, he's a table tennis player! Here's an excerpt from an online interview:

Q: What are some things you like to do when you're not playing ball?
J.J. I've got a lot of little hobbies. Fishing – now that we're out here in Florida for Spring Training, I fish pretty much every single day when we're done here.  In the off-season I spend a lot of time playing Ping Pong, try to keep my game up there.  Not as much golf anymore, I used to golf quite a bit.  Kind of shot that down, now more Ping Pong and fishing.

Q: How did you get to become a Ping Pong player?
J.J. My dad was a professional tennis player, and he still teaches for a living, and we grew up around it and I have a brother who is about 17 months older than I am, we played Ping Pong growing up and it was a sport that we kind of clicked at, and having someone as good as I was at it, and me as good as he was, kind of kept us getting better. I take a lot of pride in my Ping Pong.

Things from 1981 I'd forgotten about

As I've reported, I'm spending a couple weeks with Tim Boggan doing the page layouts and photo work on his History of U.S. Table Tennis, Vol. 11 (!). We're covering 1981 right now, which is right when I shot up as a player, starting with winning the North Carolina Open, going undefeated and winning the North Carolina Teams, and then pulling of a series of upsets at the U.S. Open. Here are some excerpts from Table Tennis Topics, now USATT Magazine:

Blog hits

You know what's irritating? Due to the way the blog is set up, it only registers a "hit" if a person goes to the blog and clicks on a specific blog on a specific date. The problem is that since the blog (as currently set up) shows the entire blog for every day since I started it on Feb. 18, so there's no need for a person to actually click on one of them. So it doesn't register as a "hit." I'm working with a programmer to fix this problem, but while the daily blog only lists at most dozens of hits, it's actually in the hundreds each day, with a cumulative total in the thousands. I'll have more specific numbers later.

When should you learn to backhand loop?

There was a time when this was considered "advanced," and players didn't bother with it until they were 2000 level. Now just about any club player can backhand loop. It's a complete paradigm shift. These days when I work with a new player, we get to backhand looping roughly as soon as they can hit 100 forehands and 100 backhands - which is usually in the first five lessons. I focus on backhand looping against backspin, but if backhand looping seems natural to them, then I might have them backhand against the block relatively early. It's important players not get too far ahead of their level and spend most of their time working on advanced shots when they can't do the fundamentals - you gotta get the fundamentals down - but that's no reason a player can't start on these shots early on, as long as they develop them properly.

ITTF Coaching Seminar in Maryland

The long wait is over . . . Tim arrived this morning

Yes, that's Tim Boggan, USATT Hall of Famer and author of History of U.S. Table Tennis, Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Yes, there are ten of them, and that only got us up to 1981! I've been doing the page layouts and photo work for these volumes - we do this once every year - with hall of fame photographer Mal Anderson helping scan the photos the last few issues.

And now Tim has gone and done the unthinkable . . . Volume 11 is ready! It covers 1981-1982. Yep, another 550 pages on just two years! Tim's rather comprehensive in his histories.

So he's moving in with me this morning for two weeks so we can put together the 550 or so pages. Basically, he'll be sitting next to me saying things like, "No, you fool, the Dan Seemiller looping photo goes there!" and stuff like that. Then, on March 17, we'll drive down to the 4-star Butterfly Cary Cup in Cary, NC, where I'm playing just the hardbat event on Friday (I won last year) and coaching, and Tim's doing the coverage.

Why do I have the feeling the next two weeks I'll be blogging about a lot of historical stuff? Maybe I'll post a daily photo or excerpt from that day's work. Maybe embarrassing photos of today's champions when they were kids? (Or I could blackmail them not to post them? Heh heh.)

Here's a short ITTF Video

It's one of those short inspirational videos (just over two minutes long), and a good way to wake you up in the morning, or get you ready to play at the club at night.

***

ITTF Coaching Seminar in Maryland

I'm running an ITTF Coaching Seminar in Maryland on weekends, April 16-17, 23-24, and (for Paralympics) April 30. USA Table Tennis has a news item on their home page on it. Here's the info flyer. And below is the news item. Hope you can join us!

There will be an ITTF Level 1 Coaching Seminar at the Maryland Table Tennis Center in Gaithersburg, MD, run by Larry Hodges. The seminar will be run on weekends: April 16-17, 23-24, and 30, with two sessions each day from 9-12, 1-4. There will be a minimum of 10 students, and a maximum of 16.

The ITTF Coaching Section is 24 hours (four sessions), and will be on the first two weekends. On April 30 there will be two Paralympics sessions. You may miss the Apr. 30 Paralympics sessions and still receive ITTF Level 1 certification but without IPTTC certification.

Those who attend can both improve their coaching skills and, upon completion of course requirements (which include 30 hours of coaching after the seminar), will be certified as an ITTF coach. Fee is $200 for the ITTF Coaching sessions, $60 for the optional Paralympics sessions. All students are required to purchase the ITTF-IPTTC Level 1 Coaching Manual, which you can buy at PaddlePalace.com, or order through Hodges by April 7. For more info on ITTF coaching, see the ITTF Coach Accreditation process.

Coaches needing housing should make their own arrangements at the Holiday Inn (one mile away), 301-948-8900.

Yes, they all play table tennis!

Yesterday I updated the Celebrities Playing Table Tennis page. (Special thanks to Steve Grant, world's greatest celebrity playing table tennis photo-finding sleuth!) It now has 1171 photos of 695 celebrities, all playing table tennis. Yesterday's updates were:

• Singers: Justin Bieber, Lil Jon, Elton John
• Actors: Kevin Spacey, Joe E. Brown, Michael Ansara
• Actresses: Barbara Eden, Susan Sarandon (new picture), Ginger Rogers, Jessica Alba, Madeleine Sologne, Phyllis Brooks
• Leaders: Walter Mondale, Benjamin Netanyahu (prime minister of Israel), Juan Carlos (future king of Spain)
• Athletes: Rafael Nadal, tennis player (new photo), Nicolas Kiefer (tennis player), Trevor Berbick (boxer), Sam Bradford (football quarterback)
• Writers: A.J. Jacobs, Howard Jacobson, Jerome Charyn, Steven Berkoff, Sloane Crosley, Davy Rothbart, Jonathan Safran Foer

Want to see a robot juggle ping-pong balls?

I do! Make sure to go to 1:05 when the second ball is added - it's pretty impressive. But then here's a humanoid robot--or more like a Terminator robot--that apparently can play table tennis! I wonder if there's video somewhere?

What U.S. table tennis celebrity is moving in with me for two weeks this Thursday?

See if you can guess!

***

Send us your own coaching news!

Congrats to the 2011 USA World and Pan Am Teams!

Here are results and other items on the Trials that were held this past weekend. I heard that on the first day, after Barney Reed upset top seed Fan Yiyong (-10,12,5,4,-10,7), Reed collapsed in his next match, against Mark Hazinski, and went to the hospital in an ambulance. According to the results, he completed the match against Hazinksi, but lost badly (7,2,5,5), finishing third in the group, and then defaulted the match for 5/6 against Michael Landers. I post more on this if I find out more.

Where should the first attack go?

Most players tend to attack first to the opponent's backhand, especially at the beginning and intermediate levels. At the higher levels, players often go after the forehand more, whether the opponent is stronger on the forehand or backhand. Most players block better on the backhand, so it makes sense to go to the forehand side first instead, where they are weaker. It also allows you to move the opponent to the forehand side and then come back to the backhand, and a moving backhand can be rather awkward.

Oriole Ping-Pong!

The U.S. National and Pan Am Team Trials

They start today, with the qualifier today, and the main trials on Sat & Sun. Here's the USATT coverage page, with draws, results, live streaming, media coverage links, etc. Here's a three-minute video about the Trials. Good luck to everyone, and may both players in every match win!

Playing the wide angles

Why don't players focus on this more? For the great majority of shots, everything should go to one of three spots: wide backhand, wide forehand, or at the opponent's middle, i.e. playing elbow. And yet most intermediate players tend to play most shots to the middle backhand or middle forehand.

Giving examples of specific matches where this made a difference makes it sound like unique examples, when in fact this is a regular tactic that will win for you. But I'll give two good examples. At the Junior Olympics a while back, I was coaching a player who had made the final of Under 14 by upset. In the final he faced the top seed, who he'd never beaten. The top seed had a very nice serve and forehand loop. So what was the strategy? I told the player I was coaching to early on return a few serves to the wide forehand. Then the rest of the match he took the serve (mostly backspin serves) right off the bounce and basically chip it back inside the server's wide backhand. He didn't do it aggressively at all, yet this simple placement strategy completely took away the server's third ball attack, and won him the National Championship. The following year he played the same player in the Under 16 final, and using the same strategy, upset him again.

Serve and Attack

A discussion I had with Dan Seemiller (5-time U.S. Men's Champion) has always stuck out with me. It was back in 1990-1991, when I spent two summers staying at his house all summer as his assistant coach for all his summer camps. He said that the thing that confused him the most about players was why so many didn't understand what he considered the simple concept that the purpose of the serve was to set up your attack, and that if you aren't attacking off your serve, then something's wrong.

There are two ways of going about this. One way is to develop an attack based on your best serves and the type of returns you get off those serves. For example, early on I developed tricky side-top serves, and so I developed a nice serve & smash. It wasn't until years later that I really learned a good backspin serve & loop game.

The other is to develop serves based on your attack. If you have a good loop, serve short and loop. If you have a good smash or counter-hitting skills, serve more side-top and fast, deep serves.

I finally figured out that the best way to develop serve and attack was to go both ways - learn to attack the type of returns I got off the serves I had developed, and to develop serves that set up my best attack shots. That gives quite an arsenal of serve & attack, and if an opponent can stop one, you can switch to another.

Some might argue that it's better to develop serves based on your best attacking shots, and while there's a good argument for that, it limits your game in that you may find a tricky serve that messes opponents up, but doesn't match your best attacking shots. By using that serve, you'll develop the attacking shot that works with that serve, and you'll have another major weapon.

ITTF Coaching Seminar

Looking for coaching in the Gaithersburg, Maryland area?

I have openings--contact me if interested. Coaching rates and other info are at the Maryland Table Tennis Center webpage - click on "Private Coaching."

The last few years I've been doing a lot of outside writing (science fiction!), and wrote a lot of short stories (47 published lifetime) and two novels (both now making the rounds at publishers & agents), but with the second novel now done, I'm about to increase my coaching hours. (Here is my science fiction & fantasy page.)

What should you do when you have extra time for a shot?

Someone asked me this recently, and I told him my response would probably become a blog posting. Here it is!

When you have extra time, there are four things you can do.