Tip of the Week
How Do You Win and Lose Points?

World Fantasy Convention
This does have a table tennis connection – USATT had two representatives at the World Fantasy Convention, which was held this past weekend, Oct. 27-30, Thur-Sun, in Columbus, OH. Attending as unofficial USATT reps were myself and Charles Richard "Chip" Patton. He's rated 1821, from Alabama, and like myself, we are both into science fiction and fantasy – especially reading and writing it. Chip also has published stories, and at the WFC signed at least one anthology with a story of his in it. As we walked the halls, I wonder how many others realized they were in the midst of two people who could destroy them in table tennis? If they'd known of our smashing and killing capabilities, would they have trembled in trepidation?

No Blog on Friday and Monday
I leave early Friday morning for the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, OH, where I'm a panelist, will do a reading, and will join other authors for a three-hour book signing on Friday night. See, I have a life outside table tennis! I return late on Sunday night. Here are two recent pictures of me at book signings, at the Lunacon SF Convention in NY and at the Capclave SF Convention in MD. (I'm toying with showing up at the full-time Columbus TTC on Saturday night, but am not sure yet if I'll be free.) Monday is Halloween, where kids everywhere dress up as little ping-pong players and go door to door singing, "Pong or Heat!", and if you don't play them a quick ping-pong match, they burn your house down. 

U.S. Open in Las Vegas
Here's the home page for the tournament, held Dec. 12-17. You can enter online or print out a paper entry form. Here's where you can see the growing list of entries, with the deadline Nov. 20. Want to know who's registered from your club or state? Click on the appropriate heading. You can list the players by name, by rating, or by event. So . . . why should you go to the U.S. Open? Here are 100 reasons.

Larry's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Yesterday was a uniquely bad day. How bad was it? Let me count the ways.

UPDATE - the problem, for now, is fixed, and I should have a regular blog again on Wednesday morning.

I'm aware of the problems on this site - it keeps going haywire - which is a server problem involving an accumulation of useless but problem-making data. TableTennisCoaching.com will likely come and go temporarily as my server works to fix the problem. I'm typing this in a short interval while it's up.
-Larry Hodges

Tip of the Week
Winning Cheap Points.

Tournament and Coaching
On Saturday I ran the 2-star Butterfly MDTTC October Open. We had 68 players. Here are the results, care of Omnipong. Congrats to Champions Chen Bo Wen, Klaus Wood, Tiffany Ke, Sam Berry, Ryan Dabbs, Hanfei Hu, and Yunhua Gong! And to Finalists Yan Zhang, Tiffany Ke (yep, two finals), Jessica Lin, Ara Sahakian, Jackson Beaver, Jackson Beaver (yep, two finals), and Thomas Sampson!

We're running into problems with the scheduling as the number of players entering Under 15 and Under 1350 have dramatically increased, mostly due to recent huge increase in kids in the 7-11 age group. The U1350 coincides with the Open, so we ran into trouble finding tables for everyone. I finally had to seed the top three players in U1350 out of the preliminaries to save us one table, which also meant that all the groups were of four players, but two of those players weren't happy with that, wanting to play more. But the event still ran long, and then we had both Under 15 and Over 50 starting, with a lot of overlap with U1350. Anyway, we're going to rework the schedule for next year to fix this, and most likely go back to running two-day events – easier scheduling and more events.

On Sunday I coached almost non-stop from 1-8PM. With Sameer, the focus is on more forehand consistency in rallies and in ending points – he's missing too many – so we did a number of drills for that. Once interesting one is where I'd serve side-topspin serves to his backhand, he'd backhand flip to my backhand, and I'd do an aggressive backhand down the line to his forehand, and then we'd continue the rally.

Notes from Thailand by Richard McAfee
[Richard is a USATT National Coach and Hall of Famer, and an ITTF Coaching Course Conductor. Think of this as a "guest column." I was going to blog about "Some Funny Coaching Incidents," but decided to move that to the end of the blog and feature this instead.]

While recently in Thailand, I had the opportunity to run a training camp for the Thai National Junior/Cadet Teams and to also watch 3 days of the Asian Junior and Cadet Championships. As I knew many players and coaches, I was able to spend a lot of time in the training area. This was very interesting as this tournament highlights the best prospects from Asia and is also a look at how each country is preparing the next generation of players. I got the chance to talk to many of the coaches about how they are preparing their next generation of players and there are some definite trends

No Regular Blog Today
Like all red-blooded, apple pie-eating, determined-to-beat-the-Chinese-in-ping-pong-someday Americans, I was up late last night watching the debate and the commentary afterwards, and so got a late start today. And now I have a non-table tennis writing project I need to finish before the weekend, and so no blog today. I'll be back tomorrow. Meanwhile, we now have the answer to the age-old question that voters have been asking since the election campaign began – who would win in table tennis between Clinton and Trump? According to this Washington Post article on Monday about Clinton, "In eighth grade, she learned to square dance, became a lifeguard, played plenty of table tennis." (Here's the famous picture of her playing husband Bill.) Oh, and here's a New Cats and Table Tennis Compilation (2:20)! 

Daniel's Inside-out Looping
I had a great session with 12-year-old Daniel yesterday. He's about 1700, but he's still struggling to be aggressive in games – he much prefers fishing and lobbing, and so usually lets his opponent attack first. He simply has zero confidence in his looping game. I've been working with him on this for months. In games he often will go for all-out smashes (forehand and backhand), but looping is just an occasional variation for him. He wins mostly by pushing, blocking, sudden smashes, and fishing & lobbing.

Yesterday might have been a breakthrough. When he forehand loops, he tends to bring his arm across his body, dissipating his power and causing occasional arm problems because of the strain it puts on his arm. Periodically we've fixed the problem, but then he falls back into the old habit. But yesterday I noticed something – when he loops inside-out to my backhand, the stroke is much smoother and technically far better. So I had him practice his inside-out loop for a time. Then I had him set up to do an inside-out loop to my backhand – but had him point to where the ball was going to go. Then I had him rotate his body so that his finger pointed crosscourt, i.e. essentially an inside-out forehand loop but crosscourt. Suddenly his technique was just right – though he said it felt funny. We spent about 60 minutes of our 90-minute session working on this with various drills, with me constantly harping on him to "loop inside-out to my forehand." Now he has that Easy Power I'm always talking about!

Random Drills
Yesterday I did a number "random drills" with students, though we first did drills leading up to them. With Daniel (age 12) who is often hesitant to loop against backspin in game situations, we started with regular multiball backspin where he looped forehands and then backhands. Then we did the 2-1 drill with backspin only – he'd backhand loop from backhand corner, then forehand loop from backhand corner, then forehand loop from forehand corner, and then repeat. Then I fed random backspin all over, and he had to loop forehand or backhand. Then we played points where he served backspin and I'd push to his forehand, he'd loop, then we'd POP (play out point). Then the same where I pushed to his backhand. Finally, we went full random – he'd serve backspin, I'd push anywhere randomly, he'd loop, and then POP. (Daniel does 90 minutes, so he gets a lot of drills.)

Tip of the Week
Play Both Weaker and Stronger Players.

Sunday Coaching
Sundays are my busiest coaching day, and yesterday was no exception. Of course, compared to some of the Chinese coaches at MDTTC (and other clubs), it was just another average day. It started with two one-hour private sessions and then a 45-min one. Then I fed multiball for 30 minutes for our "Talent Group" (MDTTC's top kids, mostly in the under 10 age group). Next came the 90-minute Beginning Class I teach every Sunday. (I also have one on Thursday nights.) And finally came the 90-minute adult training session. Technically, that was only six hours and 15 minutes, but it always seems like 16 hours.

How do I prepare for a long coaching day like this? My Sunday "ritual" is a big plate of spaghetti, extra sauce, for lunch before I start, and a granny smith apple halfway through. And lots of water.

One of the private students had been up late the night before due to homecoming, and showed up half asleep. That's always a challenge, getting them to wake up. One "technique" I often use is an old-fashioned one – I send them into the bathroom to splash cold water down their face. In this case, we did a lot of very physical looping and footwork drills to wake him up. At the end of the session we played games, and I decided to take a different approach here – I rarely attacked, just looked for ways to win "cheap" points. As he pointed out after I won the first game, "You didn't earn a single point!" But of course I had – learning to win "cheap" points is one of those things many players never learn, and so never reach their potential.