March 7, 2018

Update on History of U.S. Table Tennis and My Shoulder
Yesterday Tim Boggan and I spent most of the day going back and putting in captions and photo credits for the 116 pages we'd done on Sunday and Monday. Between that and the many changes Tim had, we only got one additional chapter done. (This time we did the captions and credits as we did the pages.) So we've now done nine chapters and 132 pages. I haven't kept track of the graphics, but I'll get a count later on.

Volume 21 covers 1994-1995. Since this was during my first tenure as editor of USA Table Tennis Magazine, probably half of the material is direct from things I wrote. So I'm having some nostalgic times seeing my past words. (Yeah, I have a lot of articles - 1791 to exact, plus 13 books. As to USA Table Tennis Magazine, I did 91 issues, 1991-1995, 1999-2007.)

It looks like it's going to take a little over eleven working days to finish, so if all goes well, we'll finish next Wednesday or Thursday. We'll see. It's a big project, put together by three USATT Hall of Famers - Tim Boggan, Mal Anderson, and, um, me. (My profile is well out of date - I hadn't even started this blog yet - it started in January, 2011, along with the weekly Tips of the Week - and I'd only written two of my eight books on table tennis, plus I've done about 14,000 hours of coaching since that time.)  

Meanwhile, I'm seeing the physical therapist three times a week for an hour, plus doing about 20 minutes of specialized stretches three times a day. I'm still doing group sessions where I just feed multiball and walk around and coach, and can do basic demos, but I'd likely hurt the shoulder if I did any private coaching with a strong player. However, I might be able to do some private coaching in a couple weeks with lower-level players who don't play as fast.

The Twelve Core Psychological Characteristics of Olympians
Here's the article from Psychology Today. I may turn this into a series of Tips of the Week, where I expand on each of these and how you can develop them. But right now I'm too busy working with Tim on the latest History of U.S. Table Tennis to think about this right now. Here are the twelve main topics - the article expands a bit on each.

  1. The ability to cope with and control anxiety. 
  2. Confidence 
  3. Mental toughness
  4. Sport intelligence
  5. The ability to focus and block out distractions
  6. Competitiveness
  7. Having a hard-work ethic
  8. The ability to set and achieve goals
  9. Coachability
  10. Hopefulness
  11. Optimism
  12. Perfectionism

2018 Seamaster Qatar Open
Here's the ITTF home page for the event, March 8-11 on Doha, Qatar.

USATT Nominates Players for 2018 World Team Championships
Here's the USATT article.

Spin, Spin, Spin: Learn to Boost Your Level With Mega Spin
Here's the article from Samson Dubina.

Table Tennis Tidbits #20: The 2016 Zagreb (Croatia) Open - Choppers’ Delight
Here's the USATT article (with links to video) by Robert Ho.

March 2018 World Ranking: How Timo Boll Made It Back to the Top
Here's the ITTF article.

Table Tennis Training Camp 2018 in China
Here's the article from EmRatThich.

Nominations Open for ITTF Athletes’ Commission
Here's the ITTF article.

Invitation to Umpire at 2018 World Veteran Championships
Here's the ITTF article.

College Table Tennis

Ask a Pro Anything: Panagiotis Gionis
Here's the ITTF video (5:43) by Adam Bobrow.

Korean Doubles High-Toss Goof
Here's the repeating gif image - still the funniest one of all! (It's actually actors from the movie "As one.")

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