Recent Coaching . . . and Frankenpaddle!
We had week three of the Thursday Beginning Junior Class, with the focus on footwork. There are 14 in the class, ranging in age from about 7 to 12, which I run, assisted by John Hsu and Martin Jezo. We demoed various footwork drills, including forehand-forehand side to side, backhand-backhand side to side, forehand-backhand side to side, and the 2-1 drill. (Backhand from backhand side, forehand from backhand side, forehand from forehand side, repeat.) Then we went into three groups with the players alternating hitting with the coach (live or multiball), and the others hitting among themselves or doing ball pickup.

The last ten minutes were the most disgusting in table tennis history. As I explained to them, I have a pet Saint Bernard (I don't), who slobbers everywhere, so I had gathered all his slobber into a bottle . . . and if they hit the bottle, I had to drink it! Suffice to say, my appeals to common decency ("Friends don't make friends drink dog saliva!") didn't work, and I was forced to take many drinks. Usually I do this with "worm juice," but I'd left my Gatorade...

SafeSport and USATT Club Compliance
As of this morning, there were 262 clubs on the USATT Club listing. I'm going to check the number again tomorrow morning. There will likely be a sizeable drop. Why? Because, as noted in this morning's USATT Insider, "January 31st SafeSport Club Compliance Declaration Deadline."

SafeSport's slogan is "Make the Commitment. Stop Abuse in Sports." The intent is good, and the program is needed. However, I've blogged some of my misgivings about the program in the past, in particular that the video and quiz are too long and a few other problems, and my suspicion that much of the program is designed more to protect the USOC (and by extension, USATT) legally than the athletes themselves. But regardless, it is now required of all "USATT certified coaches, umpires, and referees; all owners and officers of USATT clubs; tournament and league directors and organizers; all USATT board members, committee members,...

Tip of the Week
Playing the Crafty Veteran.

End-of-Season Talent Development Program Tournament and Party
We had these last night at MDTTC. The program is made up of our strongest players up to about age 13, though most are 8-11. Because several of the preliminary groups had five players, there would be one player sitting out, and so they were assigned to practice serves, and I was in charge of coaching that section. I worked with one girl on developing her forehand pendulum side-top serve (she only could serve side-backspin and sidespin); with another on his backhand serve; with a lefty who was working on breaking his serves outside the forehand corner (against a righty), with two of them on reverse pendulum serves; and so on. I also worked with some of the younger players on more basic serves.

At the end of the session, visiting coach Chen Longcan gave a speech outlining his thoughts on what he'd observed in the tournament, with John Hsu translating. (Who is Chen? Chen won the gold medal in Men’s Doubles at the 1988 Olympics; Men’s...

Coaching on Wednesday and Other Musings

• Celluloid Balls. When I went in to coach yesterday I found all the baskets of plastic balls were being used by other coaches – we had eight of them coaching already. There was one filled with the old celluloid balls – we still have them – but I didn't think my first student (Todd) would want to use them, and was about to go to the back room to get some new ones, along with a box to hold them in. But Todd said he didn't mind, he'd been using them in some of his matches anyway. So we started the session with the old Butterfly celluloid training balls, which were pretty much identical to what I'd been using since I started back in 1976 until they went to plastic a few years ago (other than the change from 38 to 40 mm in the early 2000's). Wow, were they strange!!! The lack of sound, compared to the "ping" of the plastic balls, was weird. I remember hating that sound when we first went to plastic, but after coaching almost exclusively with plastic balls for about a year, I'd grown used to that plastic sound. However, about ten minutes into the...