April 11, 2016

Tip of the Week
How to Do Demonstrations.

MDTTC April Open
I ran the tournament this past weekend at the Maryland Table Tennis Center. Here are complete results. Now, can I go back to bed?!!! (I'll put up photos later on.)

I've run about 150 USATT sanctioned tournaments, dating back to the early 1980s. However, except for two that I ran back in 2012, I hadn't run any in about a decade. But as noted in past blogs, Charlene Liu, who had been running our tournaments, is now running her own full-time club in Washington DC, and so we needed a new director. So who did they ask/recruit/enslave? (But I do get paid.)

So I had to relearn the process all over again. I used Omnipong for the tournament, just as I did in 2012, and it worked great. Wen Hsu and Lixin Lang helped out tremendously, and were the difference for me between exhaustion, and complete, utter, annihilating exhaustion.

We normally have 16 tables up at MDTTC (occasionally 18 for training), but for tournaments we normally go to eight full-sized courts, with five smaller courts for the coaches. The first event of the tournament was Under 2000 at 9AM, which had a limit of 32 players. But I wasn't checking the daily entries until too late, and on Friday I discovered we had 41 entries. I didn't want to turn players away after we'd already received their entry. Doing some intense arithmetic, I realized that would mean eight groups of five, with one player seeded out. The problem is that a group of five players means ten matches, which will normally take over three hours on one table. (Figure 20 minutes per match. For a group of four, that's six matches, and so two hours.) With Under 1700 starting at 11AM, with seven groups of four (I successfully limited that at 28, just in time), that would put us at least an hour behind.

So I worked out how we could fit in nine full-sized courts, and run it with nine groups of four, with five seeded out of the preliminaries. But while I was doing this, Wen worked out a way of fitting ten full-sized courts (still leaving four small courts for the coaches), and presto, problem solved! So I seeded only one player out, and ran ten groups of four. And guess what? It all ran right on time! (Isn't math wonderful?)

There were stretches where things at the control desk were slow. But that was rare. Much of the time I was being pulled in 17 directions as I entered players in events, did draws, printed, put on clipboards, called for players (with Lixin's help), sent them out, answered questions, and all the other stuff needed. When I discovered I'd inadvertently left a player out of Under 15 (my only mistake of the tournament – I think, though there's still a mystery of two players who said they entered but we didn't receive them, though I got them into the draws at the last minute), it happened at the worst possible time, when I was simultaneously running five events, with tables emptying out and me trying to send out playoff matches. I think my hands worked at 100,000 mph for about 15 minutes as I redid that draw and got the matches went out along with the other playoffs, all while answering non-stop questions and bantering with the large accumulation of kids from our junior program who liked to gather around the control desk. (Perhaps my bringing in a bowl of candy was a mistake?)

One interesting note – we "unleashed" a number of the 7-9 year-olds from the MDTTC Talent program. Most had played in the North American Teams in November, but they've vastly improved since then. There were some eye-popping matches where these kids battled it out with players up to nine times their age and five times their weight! When Ranjan Bhambroo won Under 1350 over 7-year-old Stanley Hsu, I told him to hold on to the picture we took of the finalists – which I'll post tomorrow – as someday he's going to want to show everyone how he once beat Stanley.

When all was done, things worked out pretty well, and all's well that ends well. We kept the tournament on time, and I think the players went home happy (other than perhaps their own personal results). Our next tournament is June 11 – see you then!

Oh, and now the down side – spending twelve hours at a desk running a tournament is not the best cure for a bad back. I did three hours of coaching yesterday, and it's not too bad, so I can do my 2.5 hours of coaching tonight. But it needs a rest, and we have a USATT teleconference tomorrow at 7PM (which overlaps my last half hour of the 2.5 hours of coaching I have scheduled Tuesday), so I'm taking tomorrow off, with Raghu subbing for me. I think I should be back to regular coaching after that, assuming my back cooperates. (I had gone about 1.5 years without back problems, so I'm hoping to repeat that.)  

North American Olympic Trials
They were held this past weekend in Toronto. Here is the USA home page for the event, with complete results, articles, pictures, and video. Congratulations to the 2016 Olympians!

• Men's Singles: Feng Yijun, Kanak Jha
• Men's Teams: Feng Yijun, Kanak Jha, Timothy Wang
• Women's Singles: Yue "Jennifer" Wu, Lily Zhang
• Women's Teams: Yue "Jennifer" Wu, Lily Zhang, Jiaqi Zheng
• Canadians: Eugene Wang in Men's Singles, Mo Zhang in Women's Singles

Kanak Jha Becomes Youngest Ever Male Table Tennis Olympian
Here's the ITTF story on the new USA Olympian. Interesting note – in the semifinals, Kanak was down 5-0 in the seventh to Canada's Pierre-Luc Theriault, but won eleven points in a row!

North American Hopes Trials
They were also held this past weekend in Toronto, for under 12 players. Here is the home page for the event, with complete results and other info. On the girl's side, my club, MDTTC had two of the four USA entries (among the eight qualifiers, the other four from Canada), Tiffany Ke and Lisa Lin, who finished third and fourth. (In the complete RR stage, where everyone played everyone else, Tiffany finished second with a 6-1 record, defeating Joanna Sung 3-0 – but the next day, in the knockout state, she lost to Joanna in the semifinals, 0-3.) The final was between the Sung sisters, Joanna and Rachel, with Rachel winning. All four semifinalists were USA, with the four Canadians all losing in the quarterfinals. On the boys' side, it was another all-USA final, with Len Yang coming back from down 0-2 to win against Mudit Mahajan. Rachel Sung and Len Yang both qualified to go to the ITTF Hopes Week in Doha, Qatar, May 29-June 4.

Table Tennis - An Open Letter to the ITTF
Here's the new animated show (5:01) from Sports Interrogation – with some great questions that match some of the very same questions I've blogged about repeatedly about the serving rules and enforcement, and boosting. (Also about audiences and other issues.) You know, those pesky rules that aren't followed while the people in charge look the other way. I watched some of the North American Olympic Trials, and it was depressing watching all the cheating that was allowed (i.e. illegal hidden serves), right out there in public, even when players complained to the umpires. I'll be blogging about that later this week, with pictures and links to video. But who can you trust, your eyes or those who pretend it isn't happening? (Actually, the ones who can fix the problem are mostly split between those who deny it's happening,  those who believe someone else should fix it, and those who simply want the problem to go away on its own, which isn't happening. Leaders are supposed to try to fix problems, not deny, punt, or ignore. I tried to get the USATT board to take action on this in December, to no avail - minutes on that will be up soon - so now it's up to ITTF.) 

Learn to Fully Develop Your Game - Before and After
Here's the new coaching article from Samson Dubina.

Taking a Hard Look at Table Tennis
Here's the new article from Coach Jon.

Ask the Coach Show
They tricked us! Episode #250 was titled "Our Last Show." And now they're back with two more episodes, with #251 creatively named titled, "We're Back." Welcome back!

• Episode #251 (22:29) - We're Back (and other segments)
• Episode #252 (24:50) - Doubles Serving Tactics (and other segments)

Lindenwood University Brothers Love Table Tennis
Here's the article.

Drabble Pong
Here's the table tennis cartoon featuring your friendly neighborhood giant multi-legged bug. (Marv Anderson alerted me to this one.)

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