Backhand-Forehand Towel Drill
Here’s a great drill I used yesterday while coaching Navin, one which you might want to try. Like many players, his crosscourt backhand doesn’t always go wide enough to the backhand, instead wandering out to the middle backhand, making things easier for the opponent as well as giving them an angle to attack into his forehand. It’s important to be able to hit accurate shots (forehand and backhand) almost always to the three main spots – wide corners and opponent’s playing elbow.

Once you do learn to play consistently wide angles into the backhand, an opponent may look to find ways to get out of this type of rally, often by going down the line to the forehand. This often happens to Navin, who can dominate the backhand diagonal but can be vulnerable to attacks to the forehand if he gives an easy opening.

So here’s the drill. I put my towel over much of the backhand side, leaving an opening about a foot wide from the corner. Then Navin and I played backhand to backhand where he had to avoid hitting the towel. A key to this was not aiming for the area between the corner and the...

Power Out
When I woke up this morning the power was out. I have no idea yet why, but it's been out for at least the last 2.5 hours. Alas, all my blogging files and links are on my desktop computer, so I don't have access to them. (I'm using my laptop on batteries for this.) So no blog today. Hopefully power will come back on soon. (I haven't called the power company yet, but will do so after this.) As if this weren't bad enough, I have a noon dentist appointment. To tide you over until tomorrow, check out the USATT news, ITTF news, or Butterfly news. Oh, and here's an animated gif of a man versus a cat. 

ADDENDUM 1 (1:00PM): Power came back on around 10:30AM. And I have the beginning of a cavity, and so have to go back to the...

Moving and Stroking
I had a rather interesting session with Todd (age 12) on Wednesday. He’s played for about 1.5 years and is now pushing 1500 in our league ratings (1456), looping nearly everything on the forehand, and recently almost as much on the backhand. But there’s always been this strange problem at the start of our sessions where it often takes him 3-5 minutes before he can effectively forehand loop. It sometimes seems as if he’s forgotten how to do it.

Then I noticed something – whenever we do footwork drills, his looping technique looks pretty good. It’s only at the start of the session, where I’m blocking to one spot for him to loop that he often seems to struggle, often reaching for the ball with awkward technique and not getting much spin. So I tried something – I had him do one-one footwork right from the start, where I blocked to his wide forehand and then middle, and he moved side to side and forehand looped. Immediately he was looping really well!

Then we went back to my blocking to one spot, and his looping technique again deteriorated. That’s when it dawned on me – he...

Old Ping-Pong Stuff
My house is loaded with old ping-pong stuff. Here’s a rundown.

• I have well over 100 collared table tennis shirts in my closet, mostly from Butterfly, the oldest dating back to (gulp!) the late 1970s!!! But I don’t wear the old ones anymore. I have about 40 I use regularly, all from the last five years, all with my name and MDTTC on the back.
• I still have the Newgy robot I used to lug around for group sessions at various locations in Maryland back in the early 1990s. Alas, it’s still set for 38 mm balls, and hasn’t been used since at least 2000, when the world switched to 40mm balls. I’m not sure what to do with it.
• I have table tennis rackets on my shelves from the 1980s, and sheets of sponge almost that old.
• I always keep a chopping blade (with long pips on one side) in my bag so students can practice against chopping. Until a year ago I had the same racket and sponge for this for over 25 years! (It’s at the club, and I forget the type of racket it is but it was a “top” chopping blade circa 1990 or so.) I finally got a new racket and sponge for...