December 30, 2014
USATT Ratings
After 14.5 years, North American Table Tennis will no longer be doing the USATT ratings, as of January 15, 2015. They are being taken over by RailStation. Here is the note on the USATT Ratings page from Richard Lee, president of NATT:
Dear USATT Members, January 15th, 2015 will be the last time NATT updates the ratings. USATT has selected a new service provider. It has been a pleasure providing this service to the USATT membership for the past eleven years. Fong Hsu and Marynes Parra have been integral in managing the service and I want to thank them for their tireless and consistent updates. Good luck in all your future matches!
Best Regards,
Richard Lee, North American Table Tennis
Below is my interview with Richard Lee - who won nearly every junior event at the Junior Nationals and Junior Olympics as a junior star from MDTTC in the 1990s!
Q: Some of us remember the mess the ratings were in 2003 when NATT took them over - constantly late. Tell us how NATT fixed and stabilized the problem.
R: As a USATT member who just came fresh off of a tournament, it was always exciting to wait and see what my rating would be when USATT officially posted them. It was disappointing when USATT headquarters ran into delays which occurred quite often. We were offered the opportunity to review USATT’s practices for processing ratings and worked on a solution that would help smooth out the system so the membership could expect to get their updated ratings timely. USATT’s office staff has many core responsibilities and to have them deal with processing individual results makes sense if the ratings coordinator isn’t busy dealing with 5 other tasks. Also, when a large tournament comes in, the USATT ratings coordinator didn’t really have any backup support that could help speed up the process. By using NATT’s services, we were able to meet the demand of handling the labor intensive task of processing ratings by putting additional resources to the task when necessary.
Q: When and why did the rating services agreement end?
R: The ratings services agreement with USATT will come to an end with our last results being processed on January 15, 2015. USATT will be working with RailStation to continue processing the ratings. I have supported the transition with everything they need and will continue to offer our support if necessary. For myself, table tennis is priority and I hope that the transition will be smooth and that RailStation can become an added benefit to the membership. The RailStation system currently being used for membership processing was put into motion a couple years ago by the USATT board of directors and it was a planned transition so that RailStation can become the one system used for membership, ratings, and all other member communication needs. I’m excited for USATT’s new CEO Gordon Kaye’s energy and direction with the association and hope he is able to implement some of the great ideas he has.
Q: Any other comments or suggestions on the ratings or ratings process?
R: I hope the membership is patient with USATT while they transition to this new system. It’s been an honor to provide this service to USATT and the membership. The system has been used by several table tennis organizations worldwide and we are proud to have been USATT’s partner for the past 11 years. I wish everyone the best of luck in their next match!
Christmas Camp
Yesterday was a relative madhouse compared to most days. This was primarily because we had a bunch of unexpected new players, and so were jammed. At one point I had nine players on just two tables for 90 minutes - and if you've ever tried to deal with nine kids (ages 5-11) in such a small area for that long, you know what that's like.
Because of the extra players, we brought out an extra table, but discovered the net was missing. We ended up using the netless table as the robot table, with rows of cups as the net. When the kids became more intent on knocking down the cups than hitting the ball over the cups, I brought out the adjustable serving height device as the net, with the bar at the lowest level - meaning the "net" was two inches too high.
Smashing and pushing were the focus of the day. I was surprised at how fast some of the new players picked up pushing. It's always amazing watching their faces the first time they push a ball with so much backspin that it comes to a stop and rolls backward on the table! Surprisingly, beginners do this more often than more advanced players because they often push the ball higher and shorter, with less forward motion.
I worked with some of the advanced players on their serves. One of the most uncorrected problems I see with advanced players is they contact the ball too high when serving, resulting in a serve that crosses the net too high. In general, even most advanced players don't understand how to make their serves bounce low. Here's my article "Serving Low," which covers five things you have to do to serve low.
Here's a group picture. It's a mostly Chinese group, but if you look closely you'll find six non-Asian players.
Westchester Open
MDTTC player and coach Ruichao Alex Chen won the four-star Westchester December Open this past weekend at the Westchester TTC in New York, defeating Michael Landers in the final, 7,9,7. (MDTTC player Nathan Hsu also made the final of Under 2500, losing to Kun Yang in the final, 5,-9,15,9.) Here's a video of the final (19:03). Here are the results. Here are photos by Glen Randmer and Warren Rosenberg.
Smash Table Tennis in Sterling, Virginia
Another full-time club in my area - Smash Table Tennis! Here's a virtual tour (52 sec), and their Facebook page. There are now seven full-time clubs within 40 minutes of me! Here's what Director/Coach Mike Levene wrote to me about the new club:
At Smash Table Tennis there’s an emphasis on growing the sport recreationally and at grass roots whilst still providing top class training for elite athletes. We have top European player/coaches who are very keen to visit – Ryan Jenkins is one and we'll confirm his dates early in the new year– the space itself is high end and was a former Gold’s Gym. A recent review on Facebook reads “Smash Table Tennis is perhaps the nicest table tennis I have even seen! Perfect flooring, perfect lighting and a facility that is a departure from the usual industrial feel of a table tennis facility”. That said I am not done with improvements to date – I plan to further improve the lighting and add a large TV for our party/recreation/conference/after school room.
League results will be pushed to our web site within 24 hours; along with player statistics. Online player profiles are available here. Anyone can register and post their player profile and picture. Note public profiles are subject to approval.
Foot traffic through the center, exposing a new audience to Table Tennis will be significantly boosted by our resident/locally well-known and 5-star rated children’s entertainer “The Jelly Bean Queen” – the creator of Balloon Man Table Tennis. The Jelly Bean Queen is 100% exclusive to Smash Table Tennis.
Being next to “Spunk”, a popular local gym, we have had several visitors from the gym curious about our sport – one was genuinely amazed seeing my 14-year-old son execute a perfect kill shot this evening (the visitors timing could not have been better!!). Language lessons in our conference room will further draw people through our center. The first step toward growing our sport is finding ways to expose people to the sport.
For recreational players Smash Table Tennis is organizing periodic meet-up events. The first event has just been announced. Details can be found here.
Check out our holiday schedule, location, events and updates online at www.smashtt.com or on our Facebook page.
Interview with the Alguetti Brothers
Here's the interview by Rahul Acharya.
Great Lobbing and Counterlooping Point
Here's the video (35 sec) between Romain Lorentz and Yu Ziyang at Korean Open.
Best Ping Pong on TV and the Movies in 2014
Here's the article from Table Tennis Nation.
Wang Liqin and Ma Long Show
Here's video (9:18) from a year ago of the two putting on an exhibition.
Super Miss Ping-Pong?
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