Tip of the Week
Learn To Play Close to the Table.

USA Table Tennis Election
Here's the USATT announcement, including statements from all six of the candidates. There are four candidates running for the two At-Large positions, and two candidates running for the one Club Representative position. (For the latter, I always wonder why they don't have USATT certified clubs vote for this, since this person represents them.) Voting for these positions starts October 29 (Thursday) through December 13.

I wasn't planning to get involved initially, but after looking over the candidates, I've decided to write a little about them and give my endorsements. I know all six of the candidates - I bet there are only about a dozen who can say that!

Here's the short version: For the At-Large positions, I strongly endorse Khoa Nguyen and Thomas Hu. For the Club Rep position, I think we have two great candidates in Will Shortz and Mike Babuin, and would be happy with either, but will give my endorsement this time to Will Shortz. Here are my thoughts, and I will start with Thomas Hu, so I can say, "Hu's on first."

Tip of the Week
Sometimes Hit Twice to the Same Spot.

Weekend Coaching and Shadow Practice
I worked mostly with the youngest players on Sunday. In the 90-minute session, we spent the first 45 minutes doing multiball. For most of it, I'd feed multiball to one player, with various footwork drills, while I'd have one or two others behind him, shadow-practicing as they match the player's movements. I'd rotate them every two minutes or so. It's a great way to work with beginning-intermediate players. Here's a video example (61 sec), but not of the players I was working with, who are a little more advanced.

Shadow practice is one of the most under-utilized training techniques. Most players try to develop both their technique and timing at the same time (i.e. stroke and hit the ball in a drill), when you can develop the stroke better if you don't always have to also time it to hit the ball. You need both, of course, but if you shadow-stroke the correct technique enough, it becomes second-nature, and makes it much easier to do so in drills and game situation. Here are three Tips of the Week on Shadow Practice:

• Shadow Practice Your Shots
• Shadow Practice for Strokes and Footwork
• Shadow Practice When You Miss

Here are some videos on shadow practice:

Tip of the Week
Don't Telegraph the Direction of Your Attack.

USA Table Tennis Announces New Membership Programs for 2021
Here's the USATT news item. Here are the first two paragraphs:

"USA Table Tennis, the National Governing Body for the sport of table tennis, today announced that the organization is implementing a new, simplified membership structure, which will take effect on January 1, 2021. Under the new program, members can select one of two available annual memberships – "Basic" and "Pro" – depending on each particular member's playing goals."

"The Pro Plan, which will cost $75 per year, will allow the member to play in all USATT Sanctioned Tournaments and Leagues, including the US Nationals and US Open. The Basic Plan, which will cost $25, permits the member to play in 0 – 4 Star Tournaments, which will include a new event – the US Nationals State Qualification Tournament – and USATT Leagues. All members will continue to receive the historical benefits of USATT membership including coverage under an accidental medical insurance policy, voting privileges, travel and sponsor discounts, access to the USATT newsletter, and full access to the complete USATT rating system."

This could be a good idea, but a lot of it will come down to execution and communication. A key thing here is that USATT will now be requiring the $25 membership to play in the USATT League. Until now, it has been free, some will not like this. How to turn USATT League players into USATT members has been an ongoing question for years. One of the keys here is that they don't have to pay the full $75 membership, only $25.

Tip of the Week
Exaggerate Serving Follow-Through in "Wrong" Direction.

This is B.E.S.T. Week - Buy Every Seemiller Tome!
Here's the new Dan Seemiller page, where you can buy both of the books by USA's greatest modern player. (It's a relatively simple page I put together.) One teaches you how to play table tennis; the other is about his table tennis life.

Here's Dan's very short resume:

• Dan Seemiller's USATT Hall of Fame Profile (by Tim Boggan)
• 5-time U.S. Men's Singles Champion: 1976, 1977, 1980, 1982, 1983
• 12-time U.S. Men's Doubles Champion: 1976-1983, 1990-1991, 1994, 2009
• 7-time U.S. Mixed Doubles Champion: 1976-1978, 1981-1983, 1988
• U.S. Men's National Team Coach, 1999-2009
• U.S. Men's Olympic Coach, 2000 Sydney, 2004 Athens
• 3-time USOC Coach of the Year for Table Tennis
• South Bend Table Tennis Club Head Coach 1996-present
• President of USA Table Tennis, 1990-1995
• Hall of Fame Inductee, 1995, Lifetime Achievement Award 2008 (youngest ever, at 58)
• A major driving force in bringing the World Veterans to the US, which led to us getting the Worlds in 2021 - well, maybe...

This is what I wrote about Dan on the page:

Tip of the Week
Use Quickness, Ball Placement, and Variation Against Short Serves.

Two Zoom Coaches Meetings
I was on two coaches Zoom meetings this past week.

• Meet the Coaching Committee (26:57). This was on Wednesday, with USATT COO Mark Thompson interviewing Pieke Franssen (chair), Gao Jun, Dave Fullen, and Larry Hodges (me).
• USA Table Tennis Coaches Catch-up (33:48). This is a new bi-weekly meeting for USATT coaches, held every other Friday at noon eastern time. Come join us! Attending this first one were Sean O'Neill (USATT High Performance Director), Doru Gheorghe (USATT High Performance Manager), Jasna Rather (USATT Director of Para Programs), Samson Dubina, Dora Kurimay, and Larry Hodges (me). For this meeting, topics of discussion were Club Status; Group and Private Lessons Status; USATT Thursday Night Challenge Update; USOPC Grants (in particular, robots and software for analysis); USATT Hopes Finals for 2020 (likely in December at Samson Dubina TTC in Akron, OH)

Weekend Coaching
Due to the pandemic, we have a limit of 12 players in a session. And so the roughly 36 players in our advanced junior program are divided into three groups. On Sunday I helped coach Group 1 and Group 3.

Tip of the Week
Against a Fast Attacker, Make At Least Two Strong Shots.

USA Table Tennis Reschedules US National Table Tennis Championships for July of 2021 . . . and My Recommendation
Here's the USATT news item. Dang! But here is my recommendation.

The problem of moving the 2020 Nationals to 2021 is that you've skipped an entire year (2020), so are the winners of the 2021 Nationals the champions for 2020 or 2021? Or are they going to run the 2020 and 2021 Nationals together or back-to-back? Suppose they run both, running the championship events as they normally do, with lots of round robin events, but only running one set of rating events. This would mean going from five or six days to nine or even ten, and many players can't afford to take that much time off. It could be a logistical nightmare as well. But there's an easier way.

My suggestion is to, this one time, run all the championship events twice, one for 2020, and one for 2021 - but run them all single elimination. (That was the common practice many years ago.) Make it two for the price of one, so when you enter, say, Under 12 Boys, they put you in both events. You get, on average fewer matches in each event, but you get two single elimination events instead of one round robin event. The rating events would be run as always, as round robin events, but you don't need to run them twice.

Tip of the Week
A Trick to Beat a Tricky Pusher.

Breaking News - US Nationals Postponed to July, 2021 in Las Vegas
Here's the news item - added on Tuesday.

Weekend Coaching
On Sunday, I worked with Group 3 of our Junior program. Most of the group did a practice tournament. However, two of the players weren't really ready for matches, and so I worked with those two the entire session. Focus was on fundamentals.

I came up with what will now go down in history as the greatest table tennis joke, to be retold through the ages. (But you have to pay me $1 every time you use it.) I asked one of the kids how many hands he has. He said two and held them up. I said I have four hands. He didn't believe me, so I shadow-practiced my forehand and said, "See, these are my four hands." (Here's the reaction.)

On Saturday, as usual I did a one-hour session with Navin Kumar. (I'm retired from private coaching, but made the one exception for "The Bionic Man." He has Parkinson's Disease and Congenital Heart Disease - his heart is mostly artificial - and he won two medals at the World Parkinson's Championships last year, bronze in singles, silver in doubles.) Here are two videos of the session:

Tip of the Week
Tactics Early In a Match: Explorers and Dominators.

My Interview at Butterfly
Here's my PongNow video (30:46) by Steve Hopkins at Butterfly! We covered a lot of material - enjoy!

Weekend Coaching
This was my first full day of coaching at MDTTC in six months. I started at noon and didn't leave until 7:15PM!!!

Because of the pandemic, our elite junior program - the "Talent Development Program" - is now divided into three levels, no more than twelve players at a time. At noon I helped coach the Level 3 group (along with John Hsu), which also is mostly the youngest group. One girl (age 7) has mostly been doing regular forehands and backhands, and lots of footwork, but has barely worked on pushing - so I spent much of the session working with her on both backhand and forehand pushing. She got pretty excited when she would pull off ones that were heavy enough that they'd stop bouncing and even bounce back into the net! Only problem was when she discovered that it was easier to get them to bounce back if she pushed high. I let her do a few like that, but then emphasized that they needed to be low.

I mostly observed and took notes the next two sessions, since I hadn't seen the players in six months. They, however, had been taking private coaching all along. They'd also developed a new, interesting habit - after a match or practice session, instead of the usual shaking of hand (a no-no these days!), they'd tap feet. Masks were worn except when they were at the table.

Tip of the Week
Move Like a Pro.

USA Table Tennis Elections
BREAKING NEWS (added Tuesday because of timeliness) - Here is the USATT Elections news item. It's timely as the deadline to apply is Sept. 10. The elections are for one or two At-Large Representatives (it's not clear) and one Club Representative. USATT really could use some new people on their Board of Directors, so why not run?

The news item is a bit confusing. It refers to the rules for the election in the USATT bylaws, but gives no link to those bylaws. It refers to the election for At-Large Representative, but doesn't mention that, according to the very bylaw referred to, there are two At-Large positions, so presumably two At-Large Representatives will be elected - but the election news item refers to it in the singular three times, so from that, they might only be electing one At-Large Representative at this time, despite the bylaws requiring two of them. I hope they will clear this up. (Bylaw 7.6(b)(3) says, "There shall be two (2) At-Large Directors that are elected by the USATT General Members, through a process conducted by the Nominating and Governance Committee." There is nothing in the bylaws about staggering the elections of the two At-Large Representatives, so if the Nominating and Governance Committee has chosen to do that, that should be in the news item to explain why two are not being elected, as required by the bylaws.)

Tip of the Week
On Short Serves to the Forehand, Challenge the Forehand, Often Go to the Backhand.

Two Weeks Training at the Samson Dubina Mega Camp in Ohio
So what was I, at age 60 and out of shape, doing training with players one-fifth to one-half my age, including numerous footwork drills that left me gasping for air and my body screaming at me to have common sense and go home and watch TV?

Like many others, I was stuck at home for five months because of the pandemic, where I got way out of shape and gained weight. So I decided to do something about it. (My club, MDTTC, where I coach, was partly open, but all group sessions, including training camps, had been cancelled.) So I contacted Samson and arranged that I'd come as a player in the mornings, a practice partner in the afternoons. That would mean five hours of intense play each day, Aug. 10-14 and 17-21.

Then I hopped in my car and drove the five hours from Maryland to Akron, Ohio and the Samson Dubina TT Academy. It was a great decision, as I got exactly what I needed - two weeks of intensive training, bringing back memories of yesteryear when I regularly trained like this. Working with Samson and Chance Friend, I even improved my backhand loop to where it's better now than when I was at my peak!

The Mega Camp, with 20 tables, was three weeks long, but I'd missed week one. About 2/3 of the players were juniors - but there were others around my age. Each week had a theme: