April 22, 2015

Five Really Bad Coaches

Here are five examples of very bad coaches. They shall all be nameless - but none of them are currently coaching table tennis in the U.S. (Alas, the tennis coach is still active.)

1) I'm going to start not with a table tennis coach (as the next four are), but a tennis coach. For many years tennis was my side sport, reaching a 4.0 level, which is pretty good. I'd often schedule my table tennis coaching so I could stop by the local tennis center for 90-minute group sessions, often 2-3 times a week. During those years I worked with many coaches, and all agreed I had the most lopsided game they'd ever seen - a very strong forehand (100% due to my table tennis, as were my other strengths), quick feet, very nice lob and very good drop shot. But the rest of my game was rather weak - weak serve (especially second serve), weak backhand (I mostly sliced), weak backhand volley, barely adequate overhead. But I loved to race around smacking in forehands, and was especially good at hitting winners off second serves, which made up for players attacking my own weak second serve.

I always told coaches I had two rules - "Larry's Rules" (tennis version):

Rule One: Don't worry about my forehand, coach me on everything else. My forehand was so much better than the rest of my game it was pointless focusing on that. Because I hit it with a hybrid stroke between table tennis and tennis, I lost some power, but made up for it by taking the ball very early, often on the rise, with precise accuracy and placement, and by throwing my whole body into each shot.

Rule Two: My game centers around forehand hitting from the baseline. This didn't mean I wouldn't play backhands or come to the net, just that my style of play would be a forehand-oriented baseline game. Why? Because I loved running around and hitting forehands, plus it's a pretty effective game - just watch Federer. (But I'm more forehand oriented than he is!) My basic rule is that if I can physically get to the ball to hit a forehand, I hit the forehand.

Then one day the tennis center brought in a new coach. I explained my two "rules" to him, and he seemed to have no problem with them. But as soon as the sessions began, he insisted on completely changing my forehand. I tried to convince him to work on all the weak parts of my games, but he insisted. This went on for a couple of months, where I went from a dominating forehand (which was better than the coach's, even though I was older than him) to basically a newbie forehand, where all my table tennis training was gone. Before I'd race around smacking forehands for winners at will; now I was flailing away like a beginner. The rest of my game stagnated while he focused on fixing/destroying my forehand.

He also tried fixing my forehand volley, which was pretty strong, while ignoring my backhand volley, which was very weak. Why? Because of my table tennis, I had a very nice forehand swinging volley. Most coaches don't like swinging volleys because in theory they are harder to control, but because of my table tennis I did this really well, but my conventional forehand volley was weak - so of course I used the swinging volley. But on the backhand I apparently had "good technique," just no control or power, mostly just padding the ball back. And yet all the coach wanted to do was "fix" my forehand volley, even when I kept asking him to focus on my weak backhand volley. (I considered adding a third "Rule," i.e. don't worry about my forehand volley.) But most of our problems were about his attempts to change my regular forehand.

Finally, while playing a doubles match at the end of a session where I kept missing, I went back to my old stroke and smacked in a clean winner off a second serve. The coach rushed out on the court immediately to "correct" my stroke. We had a big argument, and it ended with me walking off the court. I never went back.

The problem this coach had was that he couldn't think outside the box and understand that I had a rather unique background, i.e. a very good table tennis forehand, and that he needed to take that into account when coaching me. If I were a kid, then he might consider "fixing" the stroke, but I was already around fifty at the time, with all sorts of technical problems with every other aspect of my game, and so the last thing he should be doing was trying to "fix" the best part of my game while ignoring the real problems.

Plus, the customer is always right!

2) Many years ago I assisted at a coaching camp that was led by a coach who was about five feet tall. There was a player in the camp who was 6'10". The coach insisted that this player hit his forehand so that he'd follow through with the ball going to his forehead, because that's how the five-foot coach did it. It was ridiculous, and led to the tall player trying to do this incredibly awkward stroke where his racket would move forward to hit the ball, and then arbitrarily have to shoot way up in the air to the forehead, for no other reason than that was what the coach thought players were supposed to do. This is what I call "parrot coaching," where the thinking is basically, "This is how I did it, this is how my coach did it, this is how my coach's coach did it, and this is how you will do it." I finally took the tall player aside and told him to follow through lower, pointing out that the best tall players in the world also had lower follow-throughs relative to their bodies. I later gave the guy private coaching, and despite starting out in his 20s, he reached 1800 a couple years later.

3) A player made the U.S. National Men's Team using the Seemiller grip. A coach/top player (more player than coach) was brought in to train the U.S. Team for two weeks (I think just before the World Championships), and what does he do? He forced the player to change to a shakehands grip! The player resisted, but the coach insisted. So for two weeks he did as he was told. As soon as the camp ended the player went back to his normal grip. About a month or so after the camp he played the "coach" in a tournament and upset him. About a year later won the gold medal for Men's Singles at the Pan Am Games.

4) A player who had been ranked top ten in the world was hired to coach by a club (not MDTTC, not opened yet). He spent some time working with their best junior, a 13-year-old private student of mine who was already #1 in the country in Under 16 despite his age. (I'd spent the previous summer living at his house as a live-in coach.) The kid was an extremely hard worker. So what did the coach say? In front of his parents and other players, he told the 13-year-old he didn't have any talent for the game and could never be a top player. The kid didn't stop crying for hours, and never seemed to have the same drive. He quit about a year later. That coach should have been shot. I wasn't there when he said this, just saw the aftermath - the parents screaming at the coach - and found out later what had happened. They were all speaking Chinese, so I didn't know what was being said at the time.

5) I was at a tournament coaching two juniors. They had to play at the same time. I coached one in his match, but told the other how to play his opponent in the other (a slightly lower rated player), since I knew his opponent well. While I was coaching the other player, another coach came by, saw the junior had no coach, and volunteered himself to coach. Using the tactics I'd given him, the junior won the first game. The new coach, after watching the first game, told him he had to completely change his tactics, despite winning the first game. He lost three straight. Afterwards the coach for the other player approached me and told me how shocked he was that the junior had played so smart the first game, pinpointing all the weaknesses of his opponent, and then changed to a losing game and stuck with it to the end, losing badly. First rule of coaching a match - Do No Harm!!!

Champion Table Tennis DNA

Here's the article from Brian Pace.

Ask the Coach

Episode #111 (28:20) - Where Have We Been?

29 Crazy Health Benefits of Table Tennis

Here's the new article.

Ping Magazine

Here's the April issue.

11 Questions with Hau Lam

Here's the USATT Interview.

Patty's Miracle

Here's the poem by Si Wasserman, republished by USATT, on Patty Martinez's miracle comeback (down 15-20 match point) to win Women's Singles at the 1965 U.S. Open at age 13, the youngest ever to win that title.

NCTTA Superlatives for 2015

Here's the article on nominating players for "the best of the best."

Amazing Backhand Around-the-Net Shot

Here's the video (67 sec, including slo-mo replay).

Cross-Legged Table Pong

Here's the video (39 sec) as Samson Dubina trains his daughter!

Trick Shots

Here's 33 seconds of trick shots - smacking balls off basketballs and sidespin around-the-net shots.

More Humorous TT Pictures from Mike Mezyan

Someone told me yesterday the links for these pictures (posted in Facebook) didn't work for him. Just as a test, are there others where the links don't work? I could link directly to the pictures, but I'd rather link to the Facebook location, since there are often comments there about the pictures. For example, for the first one, Table Tennis Spelled Out!, I could also link to this image.

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