Living a Life of Pong
Sometimes I get so busy from all my table tennis work that I barely can find time to do anything else. I somehow make time for my other interests – science fiction reading & writing, movies, and a few other things, but those are like smoke in a hurricane of table tennis activities. When things get so busy that there’s barely time to breathe, us table tennis people have to remind ourselves that this is the business we have chosen. After all, if we weren’t doing table tennis, what would we be doing? Not table tennis!!! (Horrors!!!)

<Start non-Table Tennis Paragraph.> In my case, I’d likely be a math professor in that other lifetime that never happened. Instead, recently, in my SF writing sideline, I’ve begun writing stories that feature Mad Molly, an 80-year-old autistic black retired math professor who regularly saves the day with math, though she usually does in humorous fashion as she has her own separate motives – such as, in one story, her determination to get an ice cream pie sent to her...

Tip of the Week
Great Serves are the Best Way to Avoid Upsets and Compete with Strong Players.

$4500 Maryland State Championships
I ran them this past weekend at MDTTC, with great help from Mossa Barandao of PongMobile and Wen Hsu. Complete results are at Omnipong – the program is great for running tournaments and posting results. After the tournament finished on Sunday night, I sent in the results – and they were processed for rating shortly after lunch! (Do you remember the days when it sometimes took months, and how happy we were when they started going up consistently within ten days?)

Below is my write-up (skip ahead if you aren’t interested in the illustrious play of Marylanders – lots of other segments), which will need some adjusting as I referred to post-tournament ratings a couple of times that will likely change, though probably not too much in these two cases. Alas,...

Serve Practice and the Complacency of Non-Practice
By the time you’ve reach the intermediate or advanced level in table tennis you probably have at least decent serves. You can serve an advanced beginner off the table, and probably have “go to” serves that score you points against your peers, maybe even against stronger ones. And since you already have those serves, you don’t really need to practice them, do you? After all, you are using them in games every week, which keeps them honed and ready to use at their very best, right?

Wrong. There are three flaws with this logic.

First, no matter what level your serves are, they won’t have that little extra they’d have if you practice them regularly. Recently, in preparation for the Serving Seminar I’m running at the Nationals, I practiced my serves a few times, something I hadn’t done much recently. The result was immediate and obvious – my students, even advanced ones who were used to my serves, some of them...

$4500 Maryland State Championships and Other Tournaments
They are this weekend! I’m running them at MDTTC, with 24 events. Deadline to enter is 7PM on Thursday - though it looks like some events may fill up before that. Mossa Barandao is assisting – he and his team from PongMobile may take over running our tournaments this fall. That way I can focus more on coaching and writing. (Note - while you must be a resident of Maryland to enter Men's and Women's Singles, Open Doubles, or any of the age events, the rating events are open to all.) 

I’ve run over 180 USATT tournaments, going back to the early 1980s. These include the 4-star 1998 Eastern Open (411 entries!), and lots of tournaments at MDTTC since 1992. I also ran dozens of tournaments at the Northern Virginia TTC in the 1980s, and a number of others. (Back in the 1980s I ran them all on paper – no computers, so you had to do each draw by hand. Scary!!!)

In the early 1990s I was assistant tournament director at two U.S. Opens...