February 26, 2016

Regional Leagues, Capital Area League Finals, Results, and the New Season
Let's start with what's probably of greatest interest to you – leagues in your area. Want to play in a league? Then why not join one of these?

But what if there isn't one in your area? Then start one! (If you are in the Washington DC Metropolitan Area, now is the time to sign up for the Spring season of the Capital Area League.)

How are team leagues different from tournaments? First, you aren't risking your USATT rating – yay! But second, and more important, you have the fun of playing regularly on a team, with thousands your teammates cheering for you! I blogged about team leagues back on Nov. 24, 2014. Here is the recently created USATT League Page, and the news item on Regional Team Leagues.

The Fall 2015 season of the Capital Area League came to an end this past Saturday, with the Grand Finals at the Maryland Table Tennis Center. MDTTC A (Derek Nie, Klaus Wood, Raghu Nadmichettu) won the A Division Finals, defeating MDTTC Lions (Stefano Ratti, Ryan Dabbs, Greg Mascialino) in the final, 4-0. (NOVATTC had come in first in the regular season, edging out MDTTC A due to a default by the latter on the last meetup, but they lost 4-2 in the semifinals to the Lions here.) You can find complete results on the Capital Area League page.

But now we're on to the new season – and things are really looking up! Last season had 12 teams and 74 players, but the upcoming season already has 15 teams signed up, with a month to the March 31 deadline! The schedule is already up on Capital Area League page (I won't link to it every time I mention it…), with the first meet on April 17 at the Washington DC TTC. The newly reopened SmashTT (in a new, bigger venue) will host the second meet on April 30, with five to six meets scheduled, depending on the final schedule and division sizes. (There'll likely be three divisions.)

We ran into problems this past season over prize money. There's always an ongoing debate on this. If you put sizeable prize money into the top division, some players in other divisions feel like they are subsidizing the top players and don't think that's fair. If you don't put sizeable prize money in the top division, you don't get the top players, and so it becomes a weaker league as far as level. The solution? Get sponsors so that you can put prize money everywhere! And that's the plan this year – but mostly because we now have FIVE sponsors! So a great thanks goes to Paddle Palace, HW Global Foundation, Go Table Tennis, West, Lane & Schlager, and Pongmobile for sponsoring the league. Special thanks goes to Commissioner Stefano Ratti, who's done an excellent job in mediating the various disputes that inevitably arise, and for masterminding all these sponsorships.

Interesting Tidbits

  • A 9-year-old player I was coaching complained that he was hungry. (He's always hungry.) I jokingly told him to eat a ping-pong ball, they're filling. He picked one off the floor, put it in his mouth, and bit into it! After getting over the shock, I took the now broken (and saliva-covered) ball from him and explained about germs and the sin of breaking perfectly good ping-pong balls (someone has to pay for them!).
  • A mom and her son, about 12, came in, and were interested in trying out our table tennis robot. It was being used by Navin Kumar, the famous "Bionic Man." (Here's video of him.) I introduced them, and left. I only later found out that by an incredible coincident, the two newcomers were next-door neighbors to Navin's parents in Bangalore, India! Here's Navin's Facebook posting on this.
  • The Baltimore Sun is coming in this Sunday at about 1PM to do a feature on Derek Nie and Klaus Wood.
  • Tonight I'm doing an exhibition and clinic at the Potomac Community Center (home of the Potomac TTC), from 6:30-8:30PM.

Perfect World Team Championships
They begin this Sunday, Feb. 28 – March 6, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Here's the ITTF home page for the event, with draws, results, articles, video, pictures, quotes, etc. The draws are up, the Chinese are testing the tables (see segment below), and Kanak has his haircut, so we're all set to go! Here's the ITTF press release on 2016 World Table Tennis Championships to be Most Social of All Time, where they list all the social media they'll be on - Facebook, Instragram, Twitter, YouTube, flickR, Weibo, Wechat, youKu, and Tencent Video. (Here's the ITTF Press Release from last August on the title sponsor, Perfect China Company - thanks to TTRocks' comment on their for finding this. For some reason their logo on the ITTF page doesn't link to them.) 

National Collegiate Livestreaming
The NCTTA will be livestreaming four regional championship events this weekend!

USATT Insider
Here's the new issue that came out Wednesday.

Generation Gap, Example to Young Koreans, Joo Saehyuk
Here's the article.

Netherlands Seeks Elusive Medal but Is it Last Chance?
Here's the article.

Markham Once Again City to Decide Olympic Games Fortunes
Here's the article.

Mark Zuckerberg and the President of Indonesia Played Ping Pong in Virtual Reality Together
Here's the article and pictures.

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.

Backhand Multiball
Here's video (44 sec) of a two-shot sequence drill where the player backhand flips a short ball to the forehand, followed by a quick backhand loop off the bounce from the back hand corner of the simulated block there. Note how they don't play out the point as they are zeroing in on developing these two shots in sequence.

Great Point: Ma Long vs. Yuya Oshima
Here's the video (15 sec) between China's world #1 and Japan's world #20. That's Adam Bobrow commentating.

Chinese Stars at the Worlds in Kuala Lumpur
Here are the top four players in the world testing the tables.

Ma Long's Best Points
Here's the highlights video (4:26) of the world #1.

Cat TT Cartoons
Marv Anderson alerted me to a table tennis theme in this week's Monty comic strip! Monty teaches his cat to play table tennis – and isn't happy with the result.

***

Send us your own coaching news!