Michael Jordon and Ma Long – the Same?
Here’s the classic picture of both. There’s actually a coaching lesson in this. Players have their best performances when they just let go and let their subconscious take over, i.e. learned reactions. So when top players are performing at their best, they are basically just observers, other than basic tactics. So when they pull off great plays, whether in basketball, table tennis, or any other skill sport, they often have that reaction of essentially shrugging their shoulders and throwing up their hands, as they are just as amazed as we are at what they are doing – because, deep down, they don’t even feel like they are doing it, they are just spectators.

I’ve had this exact same feeling when I’ve played my best. I remember playing Rey Domingo – a 2500 player – in perhaps the best tournament match of my life, and I just watched as his best shots came at me in slow motion, and so easily returned, and anything I touched with my forehand was a winner. I spent the whole match focusing on not paying attention to what I was doing because if I’d thought about it, everything would speed up and my shots would stop hitting. I won the match easily.

I’m guessing most of you have had this experience as well. If not, you need to learn to let go when you play. There’s a reason why you train – so that you reactive instinctively, as the top players do.

Tip of the Week
Looping Slightly-Long Balls.

ITTF Cadet Camp at MDTTC
The ITTF, in conjunction with USA Table Tennis and the Canadian TTA, ran a four-day ITTF Cadet Camp at the Maryland Table Tennis Center over Labor Day Weekend, Fri-Mon. Fifteen players took part in the camp, including five USA national team members: Crystal Wang (Junior and Cadet Girls); Derek Nie and Klaus Wood (Cadet Boys); and Lisa Lin and Faith Hu (Mini-Cadet Girls). Also taking part were Ivy Liao and Isabelle Xiong, members of the Canadian Women’s, Junior, and Cadet Girls’ Teams. The camp had nine sessions, 22 hours total. Here’s a group picture.

Wang Qing Liang (“Leon”), recently named a USA National Cadet Coach, was the head coach, and planned out and ran much of the camp. Other coaches were Cory Eider (USATT High Performance Director), Liu Yongjiang (Canadian National Cadet Coach), and myself (a USATT certified National Coach and former USA Junior Team Coach). Wen Hsu was the Camp Coordinator. Practice partners were Nathan & John Hsu, Heather Wang, You Lyu, and Yan Zhang. (Practice partner and coach is almost interchangeable as the practice partners were also coaching and often feeding multiball.)

The 2016 U.S. Presidential Race
Here is the 2016 Presidential Race – pong style! (Here's the Facebook posting and discussion.) That’s my main blog for today – I was up all night working on it. I’ve done this twice before, though perhaps not quite as exotically:

• 2004 Presidential Race (Bush vs. Kerry)
• 2000 Presidential Race (Bush vs. Gore)

1500 Published Table Tennis Articles
I realized yesterday that I’d just hit exactly 1500 published table tennis articles, out of 1691 total published articles. (This does not include nearly 2000 blog entries.) Wow.

ITTF Cadet Camp at MDTTC
It starts this afternoon, and continues through Monday afternoon. I’m one of the coaches. Today's sessions are 3:30-5:30 and 7:30-9:30PM. There's also a reception for everyone from 5:30-7:30PM - refreshments and beverages will be served. You are invited! I'll blog about the camp on Tuesday. (No blog on Monday - Labor Day.) 

Colin Wilson: How to Fulfill Your Potential
Here’s the new podcast (41:04) from Expert Table Tennis. Colin Wilson “…represented England for many years and is a double Commonwealth medallist. As a coach, he has worked with the English national team at all levels and trained some of the top players in the country.” In this episode you’ll learn:

Revelations of a Table Tennis Champion
Our My long two-week national personal nightmare work binge is over!!! The book, “Revelations of a Table Tennis Champion” (the autobiography of Dan Seemiller) is edited, proofed, the photos fixed up, the pages laid out, and it’s all done! It came in at 214 pages with 94 pictures, divided into eleven chapters.  Book should be available around Sept. 15.

Unfortunately, it’s not actually done. This morning at about 1AM I sent the interior proofs to Dan Seemiller for him to proof. He’ll likely have changes. (Since I wrote this there have already been two changes.) Plus I haven’t finished with the front and back covers. Plus I have to decide whether it’s worth spending roughly seven hours to create an index. Anyway, today I will try to finalize the covers. Fortunately…

Flu Status
Our My long three-day national personal nightmare illness is over!!! It’s been fun exploring the many symptoms of the flu - I won’t go into that here other than to say that you have never had pain like the pain from flu-induced joint pain. I’m still pretty tired; I feel like I just ran a marathon. But I’m mostly over it just in time for…

Still Sick
I’m writing this at 4:45AM. Why? Because I’m in all sorts of joint pain from the flu, especially hip pain, and I can’t sleep. Most of the flu symptoms aren’t as bad as the last time I had the flu (though my stomach can best be described as “hyper-queasy”), but the joint pain is incredible. This happened yesterday as well – it seems to act up more at night. It’s very painful to lie down; sitting or standing is the only way to alleviate it. Anyway, the good news is that most of yesterday it wasn’t so bad, so I got a lot of work done on Dan Seemiller’s autobiography – in fact, other than the index and finalizing the covers, it’s basically ready to print out and proof. I’m hoping to do that today, flu gods permitting.

Big Breaking Sidespin Serve
Here’s the video (4:30), but the link should take you to 26 sec in, where the kid on the far side does the breaking serve. I do this serve all the time, and I’ll never understand why more players don’t learn such serves. It’s just a matter of serving deep with a lot of sidespin. Not only does it work here when you serve into an opponent’s forehand (lefty serving to righty or vice versa), but it also works if you serve it into the backhand (righty vs. righty or lefty vs. lefty), where it breaks away from the player, forcing them to reach for the ball.

USATT News Items
They have a bunch of new ones, so why not browse over them? (I linked to a few already.)

Zhang Jike Changing His Heart on Retirement
Here’s the ITTF article.

I'm sick in bed with a cold, so no blog today. I desperately need to get over this quickly so I'll be ready for the ITTF Cadet Camp at MDTTC this Frida-Mon. I also need to drag myself out of bed later today to continue the page layouts on Dan Seemiller's great new autobiography, "Revelations of a Table Tennis Champion." If I put in a full day, I'd finish the layouts today, other than the index and final proofing. (Dan - I know you're reading this! - I hope to finish tomorrow.) Meanwhile, here's a picture of a solid gold ping pong table in Dubai! 

UPDATE: It looks like I have the flu. And I was planning to get a flu shot last week, then put it off until this week....

Tip of the Week
Keep a Notebook.

How to Stay in Practice Without Practicing
A student told me over the weekend how he’d taken two weeks off for vacation, and when he came back, he couldn’t play at all. He said it took about five sessions before he could play comfortably again. He also said the same thing happens when he takes time off from his other sport, basketball. Yet, he said he knew others who seem to be able to take time off from these sports and come back very quickly. “Why?” he wondered.

Now I’ve never done a study of this, which is why this not yet ready to be a Tip of the Week, but I’ve noticed something very obvious about this. When I asked the player if he’d spent much time thinking or visualizing table tennis during his two weeks away, he said no. I think that players who take time off but spend some of that time visualizing playing (in their head), and maybe even shadow practicing it some, come back more quickly. Your game is controlled by your subconscious, and so any thinking about your shots re-enforces that muscle memory.

So next time you go on vacation or are injured, spend some time each day visualizing in your head playing a match. Really play it out! Serve and attack, receive, block, loop, counterloop, smash, lob, chop – whatever you do in a game, do it in your head. And I bet when you come back, you’ll get right back into it very quickly.

More Spin
Here’s the new coaching article from Samson Dubina.

How to Deal with Losing Confidence When Your Best Shots Start Going Wrong
Here’s the new coaching article from MHTableTennis.

Coaching During a Game, Part 2
I blogged about this last Friday, where I explained why I'm opposed to the rule - and gave 14 different reasons. Bottom line - I think the ITTF has made a dumb mistake here, and I expect the rule will eventually be rescinded. When? I don't know; maybe in a year, maybe ten, maybe never. The rule takes effect on Oct. 1. 

But now we have to make a separate decision, one that requires nuanced thinking. Given that the rule is not a good one, should USATT adopt it? At first, the obvious thought is "Heck no!" (Ah, a G-rated column blog....) Why in the world should USATT adopt a rule we consider bad? Even the USATT Umpires and Officials Committee has come out and voted unanimously that we should not adopt this rule. 

But here's the problem. Even if we don't adopt it, it will still be the rule at ITTF tournaments. That means the U.S. Open; continental Olympic and Pan Am Trials; overseas tournaments that our players go to; and I believe the North American Teams. If USATT does not adopt the rule, then what happens to our players and coaches at these events? They'll be at a terrible disadvantage. While opponents will have had lots of time to develop signals and other ways to communicate with their coaches without opponents being able to read them, and coaches and players will be used to this new style of non-stop coaching (like a cornerman in a boxing match screaming non-stop instructions), our players and coaches won't. 

How Many Ping-Pong Balls Can Fit in a Table Tennis Club?
Today's topic is scary. We're talking something that will leave many readers shaking with fear, sweating like David Sakai, and plucking their eyeballs out as they scream, "No! For God's sake, Stop!" Yes, today we're going to use math. (You have my permission to skip the math part and just read the paragraphs that give conclusions.)

How many ping-pong balls can you fit in your table tennis club? It's a simple matter of working out volume with the sphere packing formula. As we all know (after reading the Wikipedia entry I just linked to), as volume goes up and the size of the balls (sphere) goes down, the packing efficiency approaches the following density, which I'll call the Packing constant (P). (Hopefully, in my formulas below, the subscripts and superscripts will come through properly on your browser.) 

P = π/[3x(2)^½] = ~0.74048

So how can we use this?

• Let N_d = number of balls of width d that will fit in your club.
• Let C = volume in cubic inches of your club.
• Let B = volume of the balls in cubic inches.

Then the number of spheres (N) you can fit inside a given volume approaches the following:

N_d = (C/B)xP = maximum number of spheres you can fit inside your club.

To get C, you simply get the volume in cubic inches of your club. This is easy if it is roughly rectangular shaped. (We're using inches and feet here, since I live in archaic America, which hasn't adopted the metric system.) Multiply your club's dimensions in feet – length x width x height – and then multiply by 1728 (number of cubic inches in a cubic foot) to get cubic inches for your club.

Washington Post Reporter and Choppers
The reporter came in yesterday morning. It was a cause of great excitement for the kids. One of them tried to convince the reporter about how he'd floated across the Pacific in a raft with his parents as refugees from China, and that he'd learned to play table tennis with a makeshift table his parents made from a shark, with the net made from shark fins and the ball sculpted from a shark's tooth. (Full disclosure: I came up with the raft story and put the kid up to it. He drew the line at telling the reporter that he was the secret child of Trump and Clinton.) 

The reporter interviewed me for 40 minutes, with a tape recorder and taking notes as well. He followed that with similar interviews with coaches Cheng and Jack. He'll be coming back later in the week with a photographer and to interview our top juniors. Main topics we discussed were: