News and Tip of the Month

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News and Tip of the Month

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Maryland Giant Round Robin June 2011

Ben, David Thomas and Jef made up 40% of the players at this event. It was not well attended. The silver lining was that David had a great result beating Julian Waters to take his rating to 1789 and Ben 1702 with a good win against Chris Puls, commiserations to Jef 1682 and Thomas1654 who both lost to David AND Ben.

The Table Tennis Centre is please to announce that it is home to three ITTF Level 1 Coaches : Ben Arnold, David Varkey and Jef Savage.

Congratulations to Ben and David for achieving ITTF Level 1 status. The first ever ITTF Level One Coaches Course in the USA took place over two weekends at Maryland Table Tennis Center, Gaithersburg, Md. Fourteen coaches attended April 16 & 17 and again April 23 & 24, 2011, to begin the qualification process to become Internationally qualified under the International Table Tennis Federation’s global coach training program. The course was led by Larry Hodges, who qualified as ITTF Instructor at the Colorado Springs Coach Trainers Course conducted by Glen Tepper, Executive Director of Development Programs.

Larry covered material from the ITTF Level 1 Manual, including the various ITTF Coach qualifications process via the ITTF Coaching Course Pathways. He then went on to cover coaching styles and coach responsibilities when working with children’s programs, managing sports injuries, importance of warm up and warm down. The basic strokes, how to demonstrate them and group management were covered, plus games that can be used to hold children’s attention and develop their skills. Publicizing and running a Junior Program was also covered in the program.

Each Coach had to prepare and present a demonstration/explanation to fellow coaches, of a subject selected by drawing lots. Subjects included were, basic strokes, blocking, looping, lobbing, footwork, serving technique, service return, deception when serving. Once the Coaches have achieved 5 hours supervised coaching and 25 hours unsupervised, they will be awarded their ITTF LEVEL 1 Certificate and registered with the ITTF as Level 1 coaches on the ITTF website.

Tip of the Month.

Service and Service Return.

The general rule and received wisdom is to keep the serve short, go for the double bounce, but how helpful is this? Not a lot! The top players exclude specific areas of the table by serving into specific areas a high percentage of the time. See the diagram below. (From The Advanced Manual, ITTF)

This diagram shows a short sidespin serve to bounce position short centre & right block on the table. We now have to think in terms of the value of this serve to the server and the value of the return to the receiver/returner. The serve cannot be attacked with a strong stroke (defined as a medium to long heavy topspin). The least risky return is back to where the serve came from, thus placing the ball to the weaker b/h side. (Weaker is defined by the strength of the muscle group in executing a b/h stroke compared to f/h). The bounce position draws the opponent in close to the table and away from their f/h side, thus opening up the possibility of ball placement to the f/h corner they just vacated regardless of a short or long return from them. This we can call the primary return position. The secondary position is to place the ball to the wide f/h. This is a higher risk return because it opens the f/h across court again to the vacated side of the table. NOTE: The Pivot is a possibility for the b/h return.

New Serve position next month's Tip.

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