Serve Practice and the Complacency of Non-Practice
By the time you’ve reach the intermediate or advanced level in table tennis you probably have at least decent serves. You can serve an advanced beginner off the table, and probably have “go to” serves that score you points against your peers, maybe even against stronger ones. And since you already have those serves, you don’t really need to practice them, do you? After all, you are using them in games every week, which keeps them honed and ready to use at their very best, right?

Wrong. There are three flaws with this logic.

First, no matter what level your serves are, they won’t have that little extra they’d have if you practice them regularly. Recently, in preparation for the Serving Seminar I’m running at the Nationals, I practiced my serves a few times, something I hadn’t done much recently. The result was immediate and obvious – my students, even advanced ones who were used to my serves, some of them practically growing up returning them, began having fits with them. It led to a lot of frustration – I had to explain to them that they weren’t getting worse, that my serves were actually better, back to where they had been years ago when I practiced them regularly. What specifically made them better? With a little practice, I’m keeping the serves lower (low-bouncing net-grazers), and getting both more spin and (more importantly) my contact is much quicker and more deceptive (as they used to be), and receivers are having fits telling my side-backspins from my side-topspins, and other variations.

Improvement of Players Who “Goof Off”
What comes first, chicken or the egg? It’s sort of like a question that comes up regularly in table tennis. Obviously, players who work harder and train more seriously tend to get better than those who do not. But there’s a related question. Suppose you have two developing players who roughly work and train equally as hard, with one exception – while Player A is nearly 100% serious, Player B will sometimes goof off and use weird strokes. How does this latter habit effect a developing player?

I’ve noticed over many decades of coaching and observing that players who focus nearly 100% on doing the shots right, all the time, almost always improve much faster and become much better players than those who spend even a small amount of their developing time goofing off by throwing in “weird” shots. I’ve come to believe that when a developing player, after working hard for a time, throws in a few “goof off” shots where he intentionally does the shot wrong, he might be undoing much of his earlier practice and confusing his subconscious so the technique doesn’t turn into muscle memory.

For example, suppose I’m teaching forehands to two players. One is focused on getting it right, and so gets it right. The other is also mostly focused on getting it right, but interrupts practice somewhat regularly to throw in different variations of the stroke. My impression is that the first player improves much faster and gets much better because the subconscious, which is what is really learning the strokes, picks up what’s needed without interference, and so it efficiently becomes muscle memory. The latter player doesn’t improve as fast since the subconscious is confused as to what is supposed to become muscle memory, and so doesn’t learn as fast.

$4500 Maryland State Championships and Other Tournaments
They are this weekend! I’m running them at MDTTC, with 24 events. Deadline to enter is 7PM on Thursday - though it looks like some events may fill up before that. Mossa Barandao is assisting – he and his team from PongMobile may take over running our tournaments this fall. That way I can focus more on coaching and writing. (Note - while you must be a resident of Maryland to enter Men's and Women's Singles, Open Doubles, or any of the age events, the rating events are open to all.) 

I’ve run over 180 USATT tournaments, going back to the early 1980s. These include the 4-star 1998 Eastern Open (411 entries!), and lots of tournaments at MDTTC since 1992. I also ran dozens of tournaments at the Northern Virginia TTC in the 1980s, and a number of others. (Back in the 1980s I ran them all on paper – no computers, so you had to do each draw by hand. Scary!!!)

In the early 1990s I was assistant tournament director at two U.S. Opens, with Donna Sakai the director. Or was I? Just a few weeks before the first one they named someone from the sponsor – I think it was Dow Corning – as the “honorary” tournament director, and Donna’s title was switched to Operations Director, and me to Assistant Operations Director. (They did the same the following year.) But for months I was Assistant Director for the U.S. Open, and that’s what I’m sticking with!

Tip of the Week
Rallying Tactics for Blockers.

World Championships
By now you’ve seen all the results, read all the articles, and watched all the videos (see yesterday’s blog) from the World Championships. Life can now go back to normal!!! Here’s the article on the Men’s Final, Ma Long Retains Title, Most Dramatic Final Ever?, and here’s video of the final (15:06). A few observations:

Worlds
Due to a sudden last-minute “emergency,” I have to run an errand this morning. (I might write about it tomorrow.) So no blog, and the Tip of the Week will go up tomorrow. But there’s only one thing you should be watching and reading about right now, and that’s the Worlds!!! Here are videos of Men’s Singles from TTInfo. They haven’t yet put up the shortened videos of Women’s Singles – I’ll put them up when they go up. (Shortened means time between points taken out. If you want to watch the complete matches, here's the ITTF video Page.)

• Final – MA Long vs. FAN Zhendong (15:06) - Deuce in the Seventh!!!
• Semifinals - MA Long VS XU Xin (6:33)
• Semifinals - FAN Zhendong VS LEE Sangsu (5:46)
• Quarterfinals - MA Long VS BOLL Timo (6:10)
• Quarterfinals - HARIMOTO Tomokazu VS XU Xin (7:16)
• Quarterfinals - NIWA Koki VS FAN Zhendong (6:45)
• Quarterfinals - JEONG Sangeun VS WONG Chun Ting (5:59)

Service Practice
In preparation for the Serving Seminar I’ll be running at the USA Nationals, I did something a few days ago that I only do about once or twice a year these days – I practiced my serves! I’m retired from tournaments (except for occasional hardbat events at the Nationals and Open, and sometimes doubles), and so practicing my own game just isn’t high on my priorities list. But I did about 30 minutes of serve practice this past weekend, and it paid off.

At my peak I had pretty good serves. I practiced them regularly my first three years (1976-1979, ages 16-19), and from 1979-1981 (ages 19-21), I practiced them 30 minutes/day, six days/week, for two years. I continued practicing them regularly until the early 1990s. (Yes, I didn’t start playing until I was 16 – a very late starter, but I still reached 18^th in the U.S. at my peak.)

I have a huge variety of serves, mostly centered around forehand pendulum serves. My best serves were a variety of short side/top serves, which looked like backspin, and various deep serves, including fast down-the-line, fast no-spin to the middle, and big breaking serves into the backhand. I also had a nice reverse pendulum serve short to the forehand that caused havoc if I used it sparingly. Then there were the backspin/no-spin combos, the forehand tomahawk serve, the windshield wiper serves, and others.

But without practice, they have gradually deteriorated. They still give fits to “weaker” players, but my students face them regularly and so have little problem with them. Until now.

World Championships
The Worlds are going on right now, May 29 – June 5 in Düsseldorf, Germany. Here are some links.

• Main Page - Live scoring, draws & results, photo galleries, and other info.
• News Page
• Videos
• Live Steaming of Tables 1-8 (at top of ITTF home page)

USA is doing pretty well, especially Lily Zhang! For specifics of our players, see the draws in the Main Page, and do a search for “USA.” Or click on the below. (Note that where it says, for example, “1-32” in the Men’s Singles, that means the top 32 spots in the draw, i.e. the top quarter.)

Tip of the Week
Contact Point on Racket When Serving.

Habits and Homework
One of the kids I coach has a nasty habit of standing up straight, both when receiving and in rallies. You’d think this would be an “easy” habit to break, but no – it’s like the minute he goes out on the table, he forgets what he’s been practicing and he stands up like a giraffe stretching for leaves on a tree. We’ve videotaped him to show him the problem, and he understands it, so that’s not the problem. He also tends to reach for balls rather than move to them, another bad habit that mostly comes from standing up straight. Central to these problems is that he has good ball control and very nice rallying skills, and plays at a high level despite these problems – but he pays for them when he plays stronger players. (He’s about 1700, age 11.) So how to you get someone to break such a seemingly simple bad habit?

We’ve given him homework. Four days a week he is to spend about fifteen minutes shadow-practicing, with four specific exercises assigned, all involving footwork. Staying low and moving are stressed. He’s agreed to do these, and seems enthusiastic, so we’ll see if it works.

His serves aren’t every strong either, so along with the above he’s supposed to practice serves for 15 minutes after doing the shadow-practicing, i.e. 30 minutes total, four days a week. (This is in addition to three private sessions, one group session, and three nights of match play each week.) The good thing here is that at first I told him to practice serves 10 minutes, and he thought he could do 15. I’m too lenient!

He’s splitting his serving practice into three parts: Short spinny serves; long, breaking serves; and doubles serves, since he’ll be playing doubles at the upcoming Nationals. We spent some time yesterday going over the serves he should practice.

NOTE - the Tip of the Week will go up tomorrow.

Prepping for a School Club Tournament
Here’s something I’ve never done before – “dumbed down” my play so a student would be better ready to face such competition at his school! The student, who just started a club at his Middle School, was worried about their grand opening, since they were running a tournament on the first day. Everyone knew he was the big star who trained regularly, but he’d seen some of them play, and despite being about 1900 level, he was somewhere between worried and outright scared of losing to one of these basement players.

The problem was that several of them were very experienced and high-level basement players, who used cheap paddle (i.e. hardbat or slow, dead inverted), and either kept the ball in play with dead balls, or swatted in winners. They also – and most scarily – served fast serves right out of their hands, which of course is illegal, but the student didn’t want to sound like a crybaby on day one by complaining about them.

As long as he has his own racket – which he will – I don’t think there’s any way he would lose to anyone – none of his potential opponents have had training before. There is a long history of experienced tournament players finding themselves in some basement environment where they are forced to use the local cheap sponge/hardbat/sandpaper paddles that they are not used to, against basement “stars” who are, and so losing. Scott Gordon, who chairs the USATT hardbat committee and plays with a hardbat in tournaments (rated about 2000) told me this is why he originally got into hardbat, after losing to some basement player because he had to use the local equipment, and so he learned to play with other surfaces.

NOTE – I’ll be away Fri-Mon at the Baltimore Science Fiction Convention, where I’m on four panels (moderating one), plus a reading and a book signing. (While table tennis coaching and writing are my primary living, I’m also a SF writer with four novels and over 80 short stories sold.) So no blog on Friday or Monday. See you next Tuesday!

USATT University
USATT University is a reality! USATT will be running eight seminars at the upcoming USA Nationals. I’ve argued for about a zillion years that we should have increased programming like this at the Nationals and Open, and some of you may remember that when I ran for the USATT Board, one of the things I wanted to do was set up a “USATT Coaching Academy.” Well, that has morphed into USATT University! Special thanks goes to USATT CEO Gordon Kaye for making it happen, and to USATT staff members Andy Horn and Jon Tayler. Thanks also goes to others who will be teaching these seminars.

I think this is a great opportunity for USA Table Tennis to educate current and prospective coaches and organizers, as well as adding more “glitz” to our major tournaments as a further draw. If you have suggestions for future such panels, let me know.

Descriptions of the eight courses or seminars are on the USATT University flyer. Here’s the short version, in chronological order.