Thursday Off
I need a day off to catch up on things – see you on Friday!

Sports Skills and the Myth of the Natural
The following has a table tennis point to it, but starts out in a fantasy world. I’m currently reading Book Two in the Weird West Tales series by Mike Resnick, four fantasy books which feature the adventures of Doc Holliday in a re-imagined west where Americans, led by Thomas Edison, try to use science to battle the magic of Indians such as Geronimo. In Book One, “The Buntline Special,” we learn what really happened at the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Holliday takes on the undead Johnny Ringo. In Book Two, “The Doctor and the Kid,” Holliday, now broke due to a horrible loss in a poker game, needs to hunt down and kill Billy the Kid for the reward money. Alas, he can’t, as Geronimo has used his magic so bullets bounce off The Kid. Okay, as table tennis players, perhaps none of this interests you. But there’s a table tennis angle.

The novel features some very nice writing by Resnick, one of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of all time. But a passage caught my eye last night. In the scene, Doc Holliday and Billy the Kid are drinking at a bar together. They know that they are going to be having it out sometime later, but until then they have become friends. The following conversation takes place – and it could just as easily have taken place at a table tennis club, where they were discussing table tennis.

“How did you get to be so good with a gun?” asks Holliday.

"What I was trained to do long ago..."
During a coaching session last night I blocked a ball rather wide to my student’s forehand. The student moved wide and made a very nice forehand loop that went extremely wide to my forehand, well outside the corner and moving away from me very rapidly. Several things happened very quickly, all the result of training from long ago, training which coaches now try to give to their students.

First, I did exactly what I was trained to do long ago, and after my block went to the student’s wide forehand, I reflexively moved to cover the potential wide angle return to my forehand. I’m pretty sure most club players would have at most moved marginally over, leaving the wide angle open.  

Second, I did exactly what I was trained to do long ago, and stepped to the ball, instead of leaning or reaching. The ball caught me off guard with the great angle, and I’m pretty sure the great majority of club players, when they saw how wide the ball was going, would have reflexively leaned and lunged at it. As an experiment, stand up for a moment, and lean to your right. Now try moving to your right. You can’t!!! By stepping to the ball, I was able to get to it cleanly.

Third, rather than moving sideways, I did what I was trained to do long ago when blocking on the forehand – I moved in, and cut the ball off quickly before it had a chance to get away from me. This allowed me to take the ball right off the bounce – but more importantly, it allowed me to hit the ball at all. I’m pretty sure that most club players would have moved sideways, and with the ball moving away from them, they wouldn’t have been able to touch it.

Tip of the Week
Importance of Routine.

Capital Area League - and How to Create Your Own League!
They had their final meetup this past Saturday (at MDTTC) – and results and photos are up, care of Mossa Barandao and Thomas Olausson of PongMobile! There were 116 players on 24 teams this year, all in the Washington DC area (most of Maryland and Northern Virginia). It’s a great activity that brings everyone together for many hours of great fun and competition – without those pesky ratings, by the way! (Of course, you can run a league with or without ratings.) The league will continue again with a new season this Fall.

Interested in creating a league in your area? Here’s the USATT League page, where you can learn how to set up either a Team League or a Singles League (with the USATT League Rating System). If you don’t have one, you do not know what you are missing!!! Here's a video (81 sec) explaining the league software and who to contact to get it. 

A great congrats goes to everyone in the Capital Area League, but especially the following:

Living a Life of Pong
Sometimes I get so busy from all my table tennis work that I barely can find time to do anything else. I somehow make time for my other interests – science fiction reading & writing, movies, and a few other things, but those are like smoke in a hurricane of table tennis activities. When things get so busy that there’s barely time to breathe, us table tennis people have to remind ourselves that this is the business we have chosen. After all, if we weren’t doing table tennis, what would we be doing? Not table tennis!!! (Horrors!!!)

<Start non-Table Tennis Paragraph.> In my case, I’d likely be a math professor in that other lifetime that never happened. Instead, recently, in my SF writing sideline, I’ve begun writing stories that feature Mad Molly, an 80-year-old autistic black retired math professor who regularly saves the day with math, though she usually does in humorous fashion as she has her own separate motives – such as, in one story, her determination to get an ice cream pie sent to her sister in Paris before it melts, and to make it happen she has to save Washington DC from a nuclear attack. I actually get paid for these stories! Just this morning I received $315 via PayPal for a short story I recently sold. </End non-Table Tennis Paragraph.>

Admittedly, I’m busier in table tennis than most. I often envy my fellow full-time table tennis coaches, who get to focus on coaching and little else. They are often split into two types: Those who just coach table tennis, and those who coach table tennis and still train as players. (I’m sure they have more going on in their private lives.) Alas, I’ve dropped the latter, but double alas, I’ve got a lot more on my ping-pong plate than most.

Preparing for Nationals
It’s that time of year again. So . . . how does one go about preparing for a big tournament? Well, first of all, you read my article, Top Ten Ways to Play Your Best in a Tournament. Well, duh!!! But from a coach’s point of view, here is how our coaching changes.

First, in the age of nearly unregulated plastic balls, where the balls play very differently, you have to switch over to whatever ball is being used. For the upcoming Nationals, that’s the Nittaku Premium ball. I keep a supply of each of the major types, and just yesterday I tossed a bag of these balls into my playing bag.

Second, there’s more emphasis on game play, less on basic rote drills. The time to perfect shots is mostly past; now’s the time to practice what you have in game situations. That means more free play, more points starting with serve or receive, and lots of random drills. It means more emphasis on receive, sometimes playing out points, sometimes not. For top players, it sometimes means mimicking the shots of rival players they will likely play so they can prepare for them.

Third, there’s a lot of emphasis on serves. Now is not the time to develop new ones, but to hone and perfect the ones you have. The coach or player need to decide what serves they will be using in the tournament, and make sure those serves are ready and at their best. Deep serves especially need to be practiced as they are the toughest to pull out under pressure, and the easiest to miss.

Tip of the Week
Great Serves are the Best Way to Avoid Upsets and Compete with Strong Players.

$4500 Maryland State Championships
I ran them this past weekend at MDTTC, with great help from Mossa Barandao of PongMobile and Wen Hsu. Complete results are at Omnipong – the program is great for running tournaments and posting results. After the tournament finished on Sunday night, I sent in the results – and they were processed for rating shortly after lunch! (Do you remember the days when it sometimes took months, and how happy we were when they started going up consistently within ten days?)

Below is my write-up (skip ahead if you aren’t interested in the illustrious play of Marylanders – lots of other segments), which will need some adjusting as I referred to post-tournament ratings a couple of times that will likely change, though probably not too much in these two cases. Alas, there was some sort of glitch, and one event – Under 15 – has all sorts of mistakes. The results sent in were identical to the correct online ones above, but for reasons that aren’t clear yet, the results for that one event were completely jumbled up, so that it has a number of matches by players against players from other groups they never played, including 50-point losses that never actually happened. USATT is working to fix it, and hopefully they will be corrected today. 

[NOTE - ratings were corrected and are online. I've also added links to photos of the finalists in most of the events in the results below.]

No Blog Monday and Tuesday
No blog today or tomorrow (Mon and Tue) – I’m mentally and physically exhausted from running the Maryland State Championships this past weekend. (I was at the club 7:45AM-9PM on Saturday, 7:45AM-11PM Sunday, doing paperwork at the end. Everything is submitted for ratings processing. We had 88 players.) I also have to catch up on hordes of USATT, MDTTC, and writing work. Today’s priorities are to write and send out press releases on the tournament, put together a list of changes for next year, read through 43 pages of USATT printouts to prepare for a USATT teleconference at 7PM tonight (which will probably go to at least 9PM), and then get started on several long put-off writing projects. But here’s a new video of a Table Tennis Cat (19 sec)! 

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!