July 20, 2011

Varied serves

Have you been practicing your serves? (Yes, I like to ask this question on my blog every couple of weeks or so, which should indicate its importance.) At any time, can you (or your students) serve short or long, with sidespin going either way, with backspin or topspin, or with no-spin, to all parts of the table? Can you disguise these spins? Can you also serve fast and deep with varied spin (or no-spin) to the corners and middle? If the answer to any of this is no, get practicing!

Table tennis training tools

Yesterday I used two table tennis training tools in our MDTTC training camp. First, there was the ball spinning device for teaching a player to loop. (I think I wrote about this briefly in a previous blog.) It basically consists of a ball that spins freely on top of a short pole that attaches to the table with a suction cup. The player can then practice spinning the ball. If they mishit, the ball has a spring mechanism so it can bend forward instead of breaking the device. The kids had a great time with it, and learned to spin the ball. I bought the device at the U.S. Open from Newgy Table Tennis, who had gotten it from Masir Table Tennis in China, but I couldn't find it anywhere on either web site. (If you can read Chinese, take a look at the Masir site and see if you can find it so I can link to it in another blog - you'll get credit here for finding it!)

The second tool was a serving height device made by local player and coach John Olsen. It consisted of two adjustable height brackets, one on each side of the net (by the net brackets), and a pole that you balanced between them over the net. (Sorry, no picture - maybe later.) Since the brackets are adjustable, you can move the pole up or down. Then you challenge the players to serve so the ball goes between the net and the pole, i.e. they learn to serve low. I demonstrated the device on its lowest setting, where you had to serve with the ball within about half an inch or so of the net to get it through. I was going to raise it for the beginning/intermediate players, but they protested as a group - they all wanted to try the lowest setting. I said sure, be my guest, figuring none would be able to do it but that they needed to learn the hard way how hard it was to serve at that setting. Oh boy, was I wrong! While none could do it consistently, nearly all managed to do it several times. I plan to use the device again in the camp, at a higher setting, this time with the players hitting forehand to forehand or backhand to backhand, and see if they can do that. No chance, right? We'll see.

A third "device" was a bunch of paper cups. I put ten on the table and the kids take turns getting ten shots at knocking them down. (I feed them the ten shots multiball style.) I've written about this before, but it's rapidly become the most popular game in our camps, even though the players spend much of the time waiting for their turn. Ideally, I should bring in more cups and teach the kids to feed the balls to each other so they can all do this.

Disney's Ariel

Here's U.S. Women's Champion Ariel Hsing on a Disney TV commercial! (2:50) No, not this Ariel - this Ariel! Explained Rajul Sheth from ICC Table Tennis, "They've aired it since Sept 2010. It was done during 2010 ICC summer camps when Stellan was one of our visiting head coaches." (I was a visiting coach at ICC in 2009, so I missed being in the commercial, dang.)

Seeing doctor today

As I've noted a few times in my blog, I'm having major upper back problems. It is getting more and more painful to rotate for forehand shots, especially forehand loops and my forehand pendulum serve (which I use 90% of the time when I serve), as well as regular serves. It also hurts when feeding backspin in multiball, where I have to dig into the ball, though feeding topspin doesn't affect it much. (And I'm feeding multiball several hours a day right now in our training camp.) I saw a doctor a week ago and he thought I probably have two discs rubbing against each other, and referred me to an orthopedist, who I'm seeing this afternoon. Hopefully he'll figure out what exactly what the problem is and cure it by tonight, and all will be well.

Ironically, when I woke up this morning my neck was in pain, and as I type this, I can barely move my head. I think I slept on it wrong. I'm also having some knee problems. With this trio of inconveniences, this is going to be a fun day!!! (How does one get through such a day? I've resolved to have pepperoni pizza from Little Caesars tonight for dinner. Whenever my back/neck/knees remind me of what it's like to be dipped in a bed of lava, I'll just think about that pizza.)

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