January 29, 2016

Next Week is USATT Week (followed by a little "rant" on Illegal Hidden Serves)
I've been otherwise occupied on various things the last two months, but next week I'm planning to focus on USATT stuff. What does this mean? As readers of this blog know, I'm focused on three main issues right now for USATT:

Next week I plan to contact people about these issues, both those who have shown interest (and may or may not now be working to set these up), and others who might. I'm finding the first two especially promising (state championships and team leagues), while the third, regional associations, is proving more problematic. (I wrote about this in my USATT Report, which I presented to USATT at the board meeting at the USA Nationals in December. It's supposed to go online, but hasn't yet. I'll link to it when it does.)

Are you interested any of these three – running a State Championship, setting up a Regional Team league, or creating a Regional Association? Contact me! (And note that this is all volunteer work on my part – I don't get paid a penny.)

So what was I preoccupied on the last two months? In December I spent the first week working with my publisher on various issue relating to my upcoming SF novel. Then came the USATT Board Meeting, USA Nationals, and USA Team Trials in Las Vegas – another eleven days. Then I was in Eugene for a family Christmas (five days), and then our Christmas Camp (six days) – though it turned out I was barely needed for that, since we have seven full-time coaches. But December quickly turned into January, and from Jan. 5-17 USATT Historian Tim Boggan was at my house, where we worked on his History of U.S. Table Tennis Volume 17 every day from roughly 7AM to 2:30PM, and then I'd be off for our afterschool program, coaching, and some tutoring, returning late that night to do my own work (blogging, etc.).

Since that time I've been catching up on numerous issues, both table tennis and non-table tennis. (I've been working with the publisher on the novel, plus my second science fiction & fantasy short story anthology More Pings and Pongs. Buy it – you know you want to!) All this time, of course, I'm also blogging, writing Tips of the Week (as well as some SF writing), coaching, tutoring, and doing miscellaneous USATT and MDTTC work. (Today I have to put together the MDTTC Newsletter, another of my volunteer activities.) Early on the afternoon of January 21, I paused and took a breath, and it took me the rest of the day to catch up on work missed during that lapse. I won't let it happen again.

<BEGIN ILLEGAL HIDDEN SERVES RANT>
Another reason I haven't been as focused on my USATT work recently is my disgust with the illegal hidden serve issue. As I've blogged repeatedly, it's a serious issue, where we've developed a culture of cheating to the point where not only do even our top cadets have to serve illegally to compete fairly, but most of our leaders don't consider it cheating when a player breaks the rules to gain an unfair advantage. That's pretty much the definition of cheating. [As I've written before, whoever does it first in a match is cheating; if the umpire allows it, I don't consider it cheating if the other player then responds with his own illegal serves, since 1) they are no longer playing by the actual serving rules, and 2) he is not doing so to gain an illegal advantage but to take away the opponent's illegal advantage.] Unfortunately, this lack of enforcement puts those who will not cheat at a severe disadvantage. Just thinking about this problem and the lack of interest in fixing it often leads to a lack of interest in other table tennis issues. I mean seriously – players are openly cheating, right there in front of us, in public, umpires and referees are allowing it - and we just accept this???

When I see a problem, I want to fix the problem. One solution is to (duh) enforce the rules, meaning that if the serve isn't clearly legal (as required by the rules), the umpire warns or faults. Another solution is my proposed Net Visibility Rule. However, others in the sport do not seem interested in fixing the problem – they keep hoping someone else will fix the problem, and so we all sit around twiddling our fingers as nobody fixes the problem. (As I blogged before, and will again when the minutes go online, I made a motion at the December meeting that the rules should be enforced as they are written, but it was voted down, 1-6-1! Here's my blog on that. Here's my Top Junior Shocks World by Serving Legally blog, where I address the issue first humorously and then more seriously. I've blogged about this many times, so it probably does get repetitive.)

But for now, since I've been unable to get the powers-that-be in USATT to address this issue, I'm going to wait and see what happens on this issue at the meetings at the upcoming World Championships (Feb. 28 – Mar. 6 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I'm told it's a serious item on the agenda. But if nothing serious happens there, then expect me to go back on the warpath about stopping the cheating in our sport, where nearly every major title is decided by illegal hidden serves, and so we reward the cheaters and penalize the non-cheaters.
</END ILLEGAL HIDDEN SERVES RANT>

Watching a Table Tennis Class
I've been teaching table tennis classes since the 1980s. In junior classes, often there's a group of parents and others on the sidelines watching, so sometimes you feel like you are giving a performance for them – you want them to see how hard you are working to turn their kids into great table tennis players! But the world is changing. Recently I was teaching a class, and glanced over at the parents and others watching. There were eleven of them. One was watching. One was looking the other way, watching two of our top players train on another table. The other nine all had their heads down, staring at smart phones! (So the age-long questions remains: If a coach coaches a class but nobody watches, did he really coach the class?)

Reading the Ball
Here's the coaching article by Francisco Mendez, 9-time Mexican Champion and USATT & ITTF certified coach.

Matt's Coaching Blog
Matt Hetherington has started up his own coaching blog. Great, there go all my readers!

Ask the Coach Show

  • Episode #212 (23:10) - World Championships of Ping Pong (and other segments)
  • Episode #213 (18:40) - Practicing Serves at Home (and other segments)

2016 ITTF German Open Live Update
Here's where you can watch it live as well as get results. Here's the ITTF home page for the event, with more extensive results, articles, and other info. It's staking place in Berlin, Jan. 27-31.

2016 DREAM Open
Here's the article by USA Junior Team Member Angela Guan about the tournament at the Silicon Valley Table Tennis Club (SVTTC) in Milpitas, CA.

Who Will Be the 2016 World Team Champion?
Here's the feature from Butterfly.

What’s Working: Top-ranked Mississippi College Table Tennis Team
Here's the article and video (2:40).

Some Great Saive-Kreanga Points
Here's the video (2:56).

International Table Tennis
Here's my periodic note (usually every Friday) that you can great international coverage at TableTennista (which especially covers the elite players well) and at the ITTF home page (which does great regional coverage). Butterfly also has a great news page.

Wild West Ping Pong
Here's the video (71 sec) of this shootout at the OK Corral table! Great western music and a deadly finish.

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