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.

Hodges, a member of the USA Table Tennis Hall of Fame, is a USATT National Coach and an ITTF certified coach. For more info, see the flyer, or contact Coach Larry Hodges.

Videos from the 2010 USA Nationals

Did you miss the 2010 USA Nationals? Now you can watch most of the big matches! The videos are online, courtesy of the US Olympic Committee.

Article on Ichiro Ogimura

Here's a great article in Ogimura, two-time World Men's Singles Champion and former President of the ITTF. Here's the start:

In the dark days after World War II, Japan desperately needed something positive to pull the nation out of the physical and emotional rubble that it found itself in.

One unlikely hero who came along in the 1950s was a skinny, determined schoolboy named Ichiro Ogimura, who would go on to claim a dozen table tennis world titles before becoming a coaching icon and the sport's top administrator.

But Ogimura was much more than a ping-pong prodigy. The man who started out as a self-absorbed, win-at-all-costs table-tennis tyrant later used his many accomplishments and connections to help unite nations and people.

Read more!

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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!

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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 Orioles [Baltimore baseball team] put a ping pong table in the middle of the clubhouse, which proves that manager Buck Showalter isn't all business. He'll let the guys have a little fun, as long as it doesn't interfere with their work. J.J. Hardy is ridiculously good. So are Nick Markakis and Jake Arrieta, but Hardy looks like the undisputed champion. Nice reflexes."

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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.

Here's another example. I was playing an elderly pips-out penhold player with a very nice forehand smash. I realized that if I simply put the ball inside his backhand corner - with the threat of going to the wide forehand occasionally - he couldn't get around fast enough to use his forehand. So that simple strategy won the match.

Congressional Award

I'm an advisor with one of our cadet players who is working for the Congressional Award for Personal Fitness. Here's the website for the Congressional Award, and here's info on the Personal Fitness Award. Most U.S. cadet and junior players aren't in nearly as good shape as their overseas rivals; this is a great way to encourage and inspire them to get in the shape needed to compete at the highest levels. Or to just get in shape.

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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

I plan on running an ITTF coaching seminar at the Maryland Table Tennis Center on April 16-17, 23-24 with an optional Paralympic seminar on April 30. More on this next week.

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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.

1. Use the extra time to make sure you are positioned properly, and to really time the shot. Ultimately, this is most important - if you don't do this, then you'll be inconsistent and nothing else really matters.
2. With better positioning and extra time to time the shot, you can go for more power, both speed and spin. This doesn't always mean a longer backswing; it means accelerating into the ball faster. The better positioning and extra time allow you time it better. While you can extend the backswing for more power, this implies a shorter swing on less powerful loops, which can be a mistake, and lead to shorter, choppier, and less consistent loops. It's better to set up about the same all the time, and simply accelerate more for more power. However, in actual match situations, there are times when you'll be rushed, and then you do shorten the swing. (And so you'd use a longer swing when you have time.) When returning serves, players often shorten the swing when looping, but if you read the serve well, and have time, then take a full swing at it.
3. With the extra time, you can set up one way, wait a split second longer, and then go the opposite way, with the opponent reacting to the way you set up. Almost all players develop a certain timing, and even if you haven't really started your forward swing, will move to where they think you are going. So set up crosscourt, wait a split second longer, and go down the line. Or do the reverse.
4. Most advanced is similar to 3) above, except now you actually watch to see which way the opponent reacts, and go the other way. It's trickier since you don't decide the direction until the last second, but advanced players learn to do this. I do it all the time when I'm not rushed.

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Why Players Use Too Much Shoulder on Forehands

I was watching players at the club this weekend, and noticed a number of them use too much shoulder on their forehand strokes, both drives and loops. The problem with this is when you use a lot of shoulder, you aren't using your full body rotation. The key is to rotate the shoulders, not stroke with them. Otherwise, you lose power (which also leads to a loss of control), plus you'll probably eventually hurt your shoulder.

Older players often do this because of muscle stiffness, and so don't rotate the shoulders back. If you don't rotate the shoulders back, you can't rotate them forward. And so their stroke becomes mostly arm.

Beginning juniors, especially when very young, are natural mimics and so often copy what they see others do, whether it's good or bad. But even if they copy good strokes, and learn to backswing properly, sometimes they stop their shoulder rotation early on the forward swing, and so end up using too much arm at the end, and losing the power from the body rotation. It's important to rotate forward through the stroke, and not stop early and end up with just the arm swinging forward at the end.

A good way to overcome this is to imagine a rod going through your head when you do a forehand. Rotate in a circle around that rod, and make sure to do so completely through the ball.

That growing realization that you better try something different

I played a match this weekend with one of our up-and-coming junior girls. For two games, we battled it out, my steadiness versus her vicious hitting. On her serve, I'd either topspin the serve back and start countering, or push it, she'd loop, I'd block, and we'd be countering. On my serve, I'd mix in side-stop serves which she attacked, or backspin serves, which she'd push, I'd loop, and she'd jab-block or hit so aggressively I stopped using them. In most rallies, within two-three shots I'd be back fishing, then lobbing, and she wasn't missing.

She won the first two games. It finally dawned on me that no matter how steady I was, I simply wasn't going to out-counterhit her. Since counter-hitting wasn't going to work, I decided I had only one option, and went all-out physical and switched to all-out forehand looping. (I actually had another option, chopping - I can win that way, and might have gone that way in a tournament - but I wanted to win with topspin. I was determined!) It was physically exhausting (I'm 51 in a week), but once I made the decision to unhesitatingly go for the loop, the loops became stronger and steadier, and in particular deeper (thereby making them harder to attack), and I won three straight. The down side - now I dread playing her again, because it's so incredibly exhausting!

Moral of the story: sometimes you have to make a major strategy change. If you do, commit to it utterly. This doesn't mean doing only one thing. It means having complete confidence in whatever you decide to do tactically, and look to do it every chance.

Congratulations Western Open Champion Timothy Wang!

Note that you can pull up the draws and complete results for any event - take a tour!

Complete Results

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Happy President's Day!

With people off work today, I'm off to coach this morning, something I rarely do - nearly all of my coaching is afternoons and nights.

Clinic in Lancaster, PA

Barney J. Reed will run a three-hour clinic just before the Manor Open, in Lancaster, PA, on Friday, March 4, 6-9 PM. $55/player, maximum ten players. For info, contact Assistant Coach Rich Burnside, 717-968-2713.

The 2011 U.S. Open Entry Form...

...is up!

• Domestic (i.e. U.S. players)
• International

It's in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, June 30 - July 4. Note that this year it's five days long, Thur-Mon, unlike recent years when it's been four days, Wed-Sat. There's also been some rescheduling of events, so check it over carefully. I'll be there, but other than some hardbat events (I normally use sponge), I'll just be coaching and probably attending some meetings.

Playing the Wide Forehand

I played a practice match with cadet star Nathan Hsu (rated 2208, but recently as high as 2278. He's a two-winged looper who can seemingly loop anything, often off the bounce. When he's in position, standing in his backhand corner ready to attack from either wing, he can be a terror. I finally figured out that the only way I could battle with him was to get him out of position. (It's not easy playing lightning-fast juniors when you're a week away from 51 and still trying to play a mostly forehand attack game!) So I returned nearly every serve out to his wide forehand. If I did so aggressively, he'd almost always loop crosscourt, and then I could have him on the run. Even when my receive was predictable, it mostly worked. The match went into the fifth game. Starting at 5-5, I pretty much returned every single serve to the wide forehand. Did it work? Alas, I had many match points (two of them I should have won, grumble grumble), but he won 20-18 in the fifth! But we had some nice rallies.

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Adham Sharara interview

Here's an interview with ITTF President Adham Sharara, done in Shanghai this month (6:39). It covers the various rule changes in the sport and whether they were aimed at China or for the betterment of the sport, Olympic representation, various top players, and other issues.

Why do so few players mix in fast, deep serves?

It always amazes me how so many players spend years playing and practicing their games, often developing advanced serves, and yet so many of them never learn to vary in fast, deep serves. When your opponent isn't a threat to serve fast & deep, then you know the serve is either going to be short, or slow and deep, so you have plenty of time to loop it. When you add in the threat of a fast & deep serve, then you can't assume you have all that time to loop the deep serve.

You should learn all the variations:

• Placement: Wide backhand, wide forehand, middle (elbow).
• Spin: Topspin, sidespin breaking right, sidespin breaking left, no-spin. (You'll note there's no backspin here - a truly fast serve with backspin will fly off the table. But see note below about no-spin serve, which sometimes has a light backspin.)

Let me elaborate a little on the topspin and no-spin serves. If you basically meet the ball straight on, is that a topspin or no-spin serve? After bouncing twice on the table, it has a light topspin, so I call this . . . light topspin. You can, of course, contact with a more brushing motion and create more topspin.

To serve a true no-spin, you need to put a light backspin on the ball to compensate for the two bounces on the table. Some even put enough backspin on the ball so there's still a little backspin when it reaches the opponent. This makes the ball float more, but is deader than a no-spin ball, and can force more errors.

While all of these serves have their place, the two that I find most valuable are fast no-spin at the middle (which players put in the net over and over, or return weakly), and fast anything down the line to a righty's forehand (which catches forehand-favoring players over and over). Fast serves to a lefty's forehand are also effective, but because of the angle you have, a lefty generally covers that angle.

Now comes the really tough question: Why do they call it "fast & deep"? If it's fast, it's going to go deep!!! (Yes, there are short serves that come at you quick, but they are not really "fast" serves or they wouldn't go short.)

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The Professional Table Tennis Coaches Handbook

Interested in being a table tennis coach? Or just want to read about the subject?  Check out the Professional Table Tennis Coaches Handbook. I wrote this for USA Table Tennis a few years ago, and have periodically updated it since. It covers most aspects of coaching, including some key aspects that are rarely covered elsewhere, such as how much money you can make at coaching (quite a bit, surprisingly). I look at it as both an educational and recruitment tool.

I've made the argument for years that USATT should focus on recruiting and training coaches to be professional coaches and to set up and run junior programs. It's always boggled my mind that the most common response to this by many of those who run our sport is "There aren't enough students for all these coaches." Well, jeez! The whole point is that coaches need to learn to recruit new players, not focus on those who are already playing! It's not a zero sum game; it's a constantly expanding base of players, IF we focus on constantly expanding the base of players.

The chapter listing tells you much about the content:

Table of Contents

1. The Profession of Coaching
2. How Much Income Can You Make As a Table Tennis Coach?
3. What Credentials Do You Need to Be a Table Tennis Coach?
4. Getting a Facility, Tables and Other Equipment
5. Start With a Plan
6. Recruiting Students
7. Setting Up and Teaching a Class
8. Setting Up and Running a Junior Training Program
9. Private Coaching
10. Keeping Players Interested
11. Drills Library
12. Sample Flyers
13. Helpful Links & Resources

The Takeover Tour Commercial

This commercial features Nigel Sylvester (professional BMX rider - a type of cyclist) and Stevie Williams (professional skateboarder) competing in a variety of sports, including five seconds of "enhanced" table tennis (starting at 0:24 - yeah, the ball's put in by computer). From the commercial, I couldn't at first figure out what they were advertising, but from the description below, it seems they are promoting "The Takeover Tour," which brings together "top talent in skate and BMX for a cross-discipline, traveling event that has yet to be seen in the sport." So where does table tennis fit in this?

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