December 8, 2025

Tip of the Week
Coaching Yourself, Part 2 of 5: In Practice.

North American Teams
I coached 83 matches in three days at the Teams (Fri-Sun, Nov. 28-30 at the National Harbor in Maryland). It was my 50th Teams in a row (excluding the cancelled 2020 due to Covid), starting in 1976 when Gerald Ford was president. I used to play in it, but now I only coach. However, coaching can get pretty physical – as noted in my (short) blog last week, I somehow hurt my neck from all the watching, cheering, and coaching. (It’s 90% better now.) My voice got rather hoarse, my arm was hurting from three days of clapping, and I could barely hold my head up.

I was happy and proud to see MDTTC 1 in the final of the Open division. The three junior stars, Ryan Lin, Stanley Hsu, Mu Du, all started out in my beginning group sessions at MDTTC when they were around seven years old. Now they are all 16-17, with ratings of 2520, 2506, and 2356. (Ryan and Stanley are #2 and #3 in Under 18, and both have been #1 for their age group and on the US National Cadet or Junior Teams. Mu Du has been on the US National Cadet Team and has been rated as high as 2430. He had the miracle comeback in the semifinals, coming back from down 0-2 to clinch the win!) While all three “graduated” from my sessions and went on to private sessions with other MDTTC coaches along with group sessions that I sometimes coached at, I did get to coach them in tournaments for years, including a number of international tournaments and ITTF camps in Austria, Jordan, Ecuador, and Dominican Republic.

Here's the article MLTT Dominates 2025 JOOLA Teams Final by Matt Hetherington.

Here are complete results. (Make sure to set the year to 2025. Right now it seems to automatically go to 2024.) There were 846 players on 203 teams on (if I remember correctly) 129 tables. We had 14 junior teams and some great coaches (Cheng Yinghua, Jack Huang, Wang Qingliang, Wang Cheng, Lidney Castro, Eduardo “Dudu” Tomoike, and me). Each morning Coach Wang Qingliang would assign who would coach which teams each round in an online Google Doc. However, since some teams finished early, we’d then rove out and coach other teams. I coached 23 matches on Friday from 8AM to 8PM; 32 matches on Saturday from 8AM to 11:30PM; and 28 matches on Sunday from 9AM to 9:30PM. That’s 83 matches in approximately 40 hours.

Here are some of the more interesting tactical issues that came up.

  • Against a chopper with long pips, loops came back with very heavy backspin. The winning tactic? Serve heavy backspin or push deep to the backhand pips, and attack the very light backspin pushed returns. If that came back low, start over.
  • After a kid was lobbed down in the first game, I had him smash only to the wide backhand and middle, taking out the opponent’s spinnier forehand lob and counter-attacks. If the opponent made three lobs in a row, I told him to fake smash and block to the middle, and attack the next ball. He won.
  • “Attack the three spots!!!” The three spots are wide forehand, wide backhand, and middle, which means roughly the playing elbow, midway between forehand and backhand. In almost all matches you want to focus on one of the following: Attack wide forehand and middle; attack wide backhand and middle; or attack all three. Sometimes you focus on one of the three, going to another spot to draw the player away and then coming back to the weak spot. Sometimes you want to just attack the middle relentlessly.
  • “With the same serving motion, serve either short to forehand or long to backhand.” This worked against a player who liked to forehand loop all deep balls, but now had to watch out for the short serve to the forehand, followed by deep returns to his backhand.
  • “Serve from the wide forehand side so as to get an angle into the forehand to force a forehand receive.”
  • “Stop pushing to the forehand!”
  • “Do you have confidence in your backhand loop?” “No.” “Then look for balls to attack with the forehand, and after the tournament spend the next six months focusing on backhand loops.”
  • “Do you have confidence in your backhand loop?” “Yes.” “Then use it!” (Most effective use of the backhand loop is often “four-ball attacks” when receiving: serve, pushed receive (usually either short or quick and deep to backhand), server pushes to receiver’s backhand, receiver backhand loops.
  • “If you lose focus, pick out something in the distance and just stare at it for five seconds. That will clear your mind. Then go play, and think only about simple tactics.”
  • “Keep the ball deep.” (This is especially important against players with non-inverted surfaces.)
  • “Coach, I can’t stop his serve and loop.” “Have you tried pushing short?” [Long silence.] “I didn’t think of that.”
  • “Do you remember that tomahawk serve that worked so well in the first game?” “Yes.” “Why did you stop using it?” [Long silence.] “I forgot about it.”

USATT Issues
Someone asked me why I haven’t been writing much about USATT issues recently. There’s a simple reason. I try not to write much about US politics in this table tennis blog, but the reality is the US is in the middle of perhaps the worst crisis since the Civil War as we go from the greatness of being leader of the free world (and so much more – I could write a book on this) to where we are now. And so it’s hard sometimes for me to worry too much about the petty doings in an organization with ten thousand members when we’re daily hit with what’s happening in this country of 340 million. If you want my views on this, then perhaps get a copy of my (non-table tennis) book, “Trump Tales: A Taunting.” (Parts of it are dated, since it’s from 2020.) But I have and will continue to blog about major USATT misadventures, such as the decision not to hold an election last year for Club Rep (so it’s now another appointed board position for a loyalist), the illegal third term for the previous chair, rules and bylaw violations, cronyism, and more.

Marty Supreme
The first reviews are in – and it’s getting rave reviews. The movie is based on the life of Marty Reisman, who died in 2012. Though much of it is fictionalized (such as renaming Marty Reisman, the main events I believe are historically correct as (I think) it covers the events of the 1952 World Championships, when Hiroji Satoh becomes the first sponge champion and ending the hardbat era, leading to Marty’s lifelong war with sponge surfaces. I knew the flamboyant Marty very well. A few days ago I was interviewed by a reporter from Smithsonian Magazine for an article on Marty that should come out around the time of the movie, which comes out Dec. 25. I gave him lots of first-hand stories. Timothée Chalamet, who stars as Marty, is getting great acclaim, and was just nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Actor. He will almost for certain be nominated for an Oscar. The movie also was nominated for Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, and for Best Screenplay.

It's Almost Christmas Time – Last Chance to Buy My Books!!!
Here they are, both table tennis and science fiction.

Win Everything by Wanting Nothing
Here’s the video (9:12) from Andreas Levenko. A must-watch - but there’s a 60-sec commercial for something at the start.

5 Ways to Implement Deliberate Practice for Achieving High Performance in Table Tennis
Here’s the article by Dr. Alan Chu, PhD, CMPC.

Butterfly Training Tips (These are from the past week.)

New from PongSpace

Revolutionary Short Pimple Block
Here’s the video (3:12) from Pingispågarna.

Training session between Quadri Aruna & Lim Jonghoon
Here’s the video (56:04) from Tony’s Table Tennis Talk. Quadri Aruna is world #27 from Nigeria; Lim Jonghoon is world #77 from Korea.

New from PingSunday
37 videos in past week!

New from PingSkills
Ask the Coach

Major League Table Tennis

New from NCTTA

New from Steve Hopkins/Butterfly

USATT News

ITTF News (I’m going back to Nov. 24. Skip ahead if not interested.)

Stay in Your Path
Here’s the video (25 sec) from Aga Pingpong!

Cricket Wireless Commercial 2025 Ping Pong
Here’s the commercial (71 sec).

Pokemon Ping-Ping
Here’s the video (29 sec)!

Wildest Racket Throws in Table Tennis History
Here’s the video (9:09)!

Buffalo Pong?
Here’s the picture!

My New T-Rex Hat and Shirt
Here they are!

Flying to France for a Big Table Tennis Event! 
Here’s the video (12:04) from Adam Bobrow!

Most Viral Ping Pong Clips On The Internet
Here’s the video (17:03) from Pongfinity!

Non-Table Tennis – Recent Science Fiction & Fantasy Publications and Sales

  • “The Time and Place of the Invasion” was published in Black Cat Weekly on Nov. 9. It’s a dark and humorous story that takes place on June 4, 1944, a few days before the Normandy invasion. Two German physicists, Dr. Werner Heisenberg and Dr. Erwin Schrödinger, are summoned by Hitler. One of them knows the time of the invasion, the other the place of the invasion, and Hitler demands they tell him both. However, as the physicists explain to him, if he were to know the time and the place at the same time, very bad things will happen. (It’s a play on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.)
  • “The Crab and the Cambrian Ghost” was published on Nov. 28 in Murderfish: An Aquatic Anthology from Wonderbird Press. A paranoid hermit crab believes the world is out to get him and vows vengeance – and then he inadvertently frees a ghostly nautilus. (Spoiler – it’s a genie.) All heck breaks loose!
  • “Three Wishes of a Dead Man . . . Served Hot” came out Nov. 12 in Ancestral Recall #4 from Ahoy Comics (here it is at Amazon). An aging physicist, now on his deathbed, had once struggled to solve the secrets of the universe, with help from a genie – but others kept publishing first. Now he’s out for revenge.
  • “Trump Administration Job Application” sold on Nov. 2 to the More Alternative Liberties anthology from B-Cubed Press, which should come out early next year.
  • “The Red Patrol” sold to Black Cat Weekly on Dec. 6. Two army patrols battle on a checkerboard as they try to figure out the rules of the battlefield and contemplate the futility of it all, and wonder why there are voices and giant, ugly hands coming out of the sky.

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