Fall Scheduling
With local schools starting next week, I’m working out my new Fall coaching schedule. This is one of those surprisingly tricky things, sort of like trying to do a 20-piece jigsaw puzzle, which sounds easy except the pieces keep moving around, changing shape, and sometimes disappearing, with new ones showing up randomly.

During the summer we have little private coaching before 6PM (Mon-Fri) due to our summer camps. (Only available times are before 10AM and during the 1-3PM lunch break, but I rarely schedule during those times.) So while we often have sessions after school at 4 or 5PM, during the summer everyone has to move to after 6PM. But now, with school nights, the kids generally do their sessions earlier. But strangely, most of them have other afterschool activities (!), so we have to schedule around them. Worse, their schedules aren’t set in stone – they keep changing as they get new info, and sometimes it changes, week to week. Plus I have to work the schedules around my group sessions, which are mostly on Thursdays and weekends.

My weekend schedule won’t change much, just my Mon-Fri schedule. If I were one of the 50-hour/week coaches (we have several at my club), I’d be spreading them out all week. But since I generally can’t do more than about 20 hours per week, I’m trying to corral all the sessions into three weekdays, plus Sat & Sun. But last night I saw a glimmer of a chance, just a chance, that I might be able to schedule all my weekday sessions into two longer days and nights – something that would make me very happy. That would give me three days off three days to do more writing and other USATT & MDTTC stuff!!!

Tip of the Week
Covering the Wide Angles.

$2700 Butterfly MDTTC August Open, PongMobile, and that Nasty Todo List
Getting up to blog after a pair of 15-hour days is like facing Mayweather for 12 rounds, then fighting The Mountain from Game of Thrones, and then jogging a marathon or two. This past weekend I ran the tournament, with great help from Mossa Barandao of PongMobile. I plan to do a write-up later today, with pictures, which I’ll send off for publication at the news sites at USATT and Butterfly, and link to from my blog afterwards. You can get complete results at Omnipong. Congrats to champions Jishan Liang, Khaleel Asgarali, Ed Watts, Kallista Liu, Haoran Guan, Stephanie Zhang, Todd Klinger, Xinsheng Michael Huang, George Li, and Stanley Hsu!

What’s PongMobile? Mossa sets up a station at our tournaments and leagues so players can easily look up their ratings and ratings histories, both in numbers and graphic form. (The station is always surrounded by players looking up all their friends, coaches, and rivals.) But it’s more than that. It allows you to:

USATT Coaching Questions
I’ve been very busy this summer - coaching, traveling, and writing. One casualty of this is that I haven’t done as much as chair of the USATT coaching committee as I’d have liked. However, sometime in the next few weeks I should be able to focus more on that. Here are upcoming coaching items. (Here’s the list of USATT committees – we’re third on the list.) I also have a coaching committee report due to the board, which I should have by Sept. 1. (We have a USATT board meeting in Washington DC, Sept. 9-10.)

What is the primary responsibility of the coaching committee? I’d say to recruit, train, and certify coaches. Recruitment basically means encouraging potential coaches into taking the plunge, either as part-time or full-time coaches. For the latter, this essentially means showing them that they can make a good living as a table tennis coach – as over 300 currently do in the United States.

Training means educating coaches so they become better coaches. I’ve had numerous discussions with USATT people on how best to do this, especially USATT High Performance Director Jorg Bitzigeio and past coaching chair Richard McAfee. Here are some possibilities:

Play Hardbat or Sandpaper – Here’s Why
No, this will not be an evangelizing blog entry on why we should make sponge illegal and go back to a simpler time when everyone used hardbat, politicians were honest, and life was perfect. (No, those times never happened.) There’s a better reason why you should bring out that cheap hardbat or sandpaper paddle you have stored away at the back of your closet (or borrow one from someone), and learn to play with it.

Putting aside the fact that it is fun, as a sideline, to play with these rackets, there’s a better reason. There are table tennis tables all over the place. Unless you are some oddball who carries his $300 table tennis racket (and table tennis shoes, plastic balls, table tennis towel, net measurer, etc.) everywhere, you will someday find yourself someday at a table without your racket, watching inferior players play each other, each believing themselves to be champions, or at least competitive with the best players – of whom they have never seen. You will be forced to do one of the following:

$80,000/Year Coaching Table Tennis?
An interesting question was raised at the Mytabletennis.net forum – how much money can one make coaching table tennis? At least one person ridiculed the idea that one could make $80,000/year coaching table tennis. However, many coaches in the U.S. do just that, including ones from my club. The arithmetic is simple. If you coach 40 hours/week at $40/hour for 50 weeks per year, you’ll make $80,000/year.

The reality is that there are a number of coaches at full-time clubs who work more like 50/hours a week, which comes to $100,000/year. Add in group sessions, where you often make more than you do in private sessions, and the annual salary goes up. Add in secondary income from selling equipment, tournaments, leagues, and so on, and some coaches get still more.

The $40/hour is typical, but not standard everywhere. In expensive areas like New York City coaching is more like $80/hour. The club typically gets a percentage, but most successful clubs know that they rely on the coaches to bring in and retain players, so they let them keep the bulk of their money. At my club, for example, private lessons are $50/hour for members, $60/hour for non-members, with the club keeping $10/hour of that. (This is different for some of our coaches, who have different deals that involve salary, housing, and other amenities, but they still get pretty good hourly wages on top of all that.) In a place like New York, full-time coaches make even more per hour, and so more annually.  

A Short History of Chop Blocks
Recently, due to an article at SportsFlu, there’s been a lot of talk about chop blocking and who invented it. Here’s an entire thread devoted to it at the Mytabletennis.net forum. According to the article, it was “invented” by Koki Niwa, world #9 from Japan. Alas, it’s been around long before Koki was born in 1994.

To give you some perspective on how long players have been chop blocking, here’s a little history – and I’ll get to the point momentarily. How many of you remember the Paddle Point Rule? Until the early 1990s, if the ball went off the end of the table but hit your paddle, you lost the point, no matter how obviously the ball was off. Many thought it was a silly rule, and it was finally changed. (Here’s my blog where I explain how that happened – I made the original proposal to change the rule.) The argument for the rule was that sometimes players took the ball so quick off the bounce that you couldn’t tell if it hit the table first or not – something that doesn’t happen much in the modern sponge game.

But guess what? During the hardbat era, this was quite common, as players often chop-blocked. They not only took the ball right off the bounce, they chopped down on it, and so contact was often almost as the ball hit the table. One of the top experts at this was none other than Iowa’s Houshang Bozorgzadeh, three-time Iranian Men’s Champion, third at the 1958 Asian Games, and a long-time U.S. Men’s Team Coach in the 1970s and 80s.

Tip of the Week
Fourth-Ball Backhand Loop Attack. Of course, today’s the day when you should browse through all of my Tips of the Week (497 total) since “Eclipse TT” is just an anagram for “Select Tip”!

Two Common Successful Serving Patterns
In the adult training session last night I pointed out that there are really two main successful serving patterns among most players. At the higher levels, the most common one is half-long toward the middle, often mixing in backhand and no-spin serves, with sidespin and side-top mixed in. By serving half-long, you make it tricky for the receiver to rush or angle you, while also making it difficult for him to attack. (Half-long means the second bounce, given the chance, would bounce just short of the end-line. Some serve it slightly longer, just past the end-line, leading to many awkward loop attempts.)

By serving to the middle it cuts off the extreme angles, and makes it easier to follow up with an attack, especially a forehand attack. When you serve short to a corner, you give the receiver an extreme angle, and so you have a lot more table to potentially cover. For example, if you serve short to the forehand, you have to guard that extreme forehand angle, and so the receiver can take away your forehand attack by simply going down the line – which also means you might have to move to play that backhand since you were guarding that wide forehand. There’s just a lot more table to cover when you serve this way.

Off Today
As mentioned in my blog yesterday, I’m off today – I’ve been on the go for weeks without a break, including ten straight 14-16 hour days while working with Tim on his new book. But to help you get through the weekend, why not follow the action at the Bulgarian Open and the El Salvador Junior & Cadet Open? Oh, and here’s video (1:35) of a baby feeding multiball to a player – the best multiball practice I’ve ever seen!!! 

Most Common Mistake
I’ve been thinking about what are the most common mistakes players make, and came to a surprising conclusion. There are lots of common problems that gradually decrease as players improve, but what one thing seems somewhat more prevalent than most as players move up? I think it’s contact on the serve is too high.

If you contact the ball too high, the ball bounces higher on the other side. But it’s a subtle thing, and so there’s not a lot of feedback that forces a player to lower his contact point. Instead, players just generally return the serve more consistently and more aggressively. The server often doesn’t notice this as it often just means the receiver, given a slightly higher ball (and so a larger target on the other side), may just push better than otherwise, or perhaps attack just a little better. Instead, learn to contact the ball lower on the serve, perhaps at net height. This leads to a lower serve, which forces the opponent to lift the ball upwards instead of driving it forward, which leads to weaker and more erratic receives.

When I see players at our club practicing their serves I think about 80% of the time I’m calling out, “Lower contact point!” Here’s my Tip on Serving Low.

Injuries
They come in bunches. I’m taking tomorrow off from everything to rest, so no blog tomorrow. (Friday is my off day for coaching.) Here’s a rundown.

Bob Tretheway RIP
He died yesterday, at age 69, of congestive heart failure, which he’d been suffering from for several years. Bob was the director for USA Table Tennis from the early 1980s to around 1989. (He was never officially the Executive Director of CEO – his formal title was National Program Director – but since we didn’t have an ED or CEO in those days, he essentially was it.)

In 1985, Bob was instrumental in starting up USATT’s Resident Training Program, starting in September that year. This was primarily a junior program for the best USA players, where they’d live in a dormitory (“Building 83”) at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, go to school (East Middle School and Palmer High School), and train at the table tennis hall (“Building 65”).

In December he brought me in, officially as a player (though I was too old for the program at 25), but really to help develop various coaching manuals, including Instructor’s Guide to Table Tennis. Soon I was named assistant manager, then manager, and later I became the director and one of the coaches. Many players went through the program there, including Sean O’Neill, Jim Butler, Todd Sweeris, Eric Owens, Randy Cohen, Brian Pace, Sean Lonergan, Dhiren Narotam, Chi-Sun Chui, Rocky Wang, Diana and Lisa Gee, Nan Li, Li Ai, and many dozens of others (apologies for those not named). Coaches, practice partners, and other staff at various times included Li Zhenshi, Li Zhang, Henan Li Ai, Liguo Ai, Cheng Yinghua, Jack Huang, Xu Huazhang, Ty Hoff, Mark Kennedy, and Scott Preiss. (The program ended around 1993.)