5 DAYS AGO - Tip of the Week Recipe for Table Tennis Success. I had a little fun this week! Virginia Sung Appointed New CEO of USA Table Tennis Here's the USATT article. She starts work today. Here main credentials (from the article, and these are only a very brief outline): Ms Sung founded and served as CEO of a number of large scale businesses in China, some with over 200 employees. She also holds a Bachelor of Philosophy from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. As a player, she represented the USA on numerous occasions, including as a six-time member of the US World Championships team between 1993 and 2001, a finalist in the Women's Singles event at the 2001 National Championships, and the co-winner of National Champion Women's Doubles event in 1998. I knew her from many years ago, but mostly as a seemingly very shy junior after she moved to the U.S. from China at age 14, when her English wasn't so good. (She's very fluent now, almost no accent.) She lived and Collapse

06/05/2019 - This week's blog will go up tomorrow (Tuesday). I have an incredibly painful toothache and have an "emergency" appointment at noon today. Until this is fixed I won't be doing much of anything.  Collapse

19/04/2019 - Can you tell me who are the table tennis officials and what are their duties? What do the umpires of table tennis have to do? Collapse

16/04/2019 - The World Championships 2019 takes place in Budapest, Hungary from 21-28 April. Get all the Mens Singles results here... Collapse

08/04/2019 - Tip of the Week Remember Your Best Match. Miscellaneous Topics Weekend Coaching - I was actually supposed to spend Fri and Sat at the Ravencon Science Fiction Convention in Williamsburg, VA, but had to drop out because I was sick. The only coaching I did was on Sunday, 3.5 hours of group sessions. We started a new ten-week Beginning Junior Class. The focus in the first class was grip, stance, ball-bouncing, and the forehand. We finished with games, with half the class playing real ones, the younger ones playing first around-the-world, and then taking turns trying to hit my Gatorade bottle, with me feeding multiball - if they hit it, I had to drink the "worm juice" inside. In the more advanced Talent Development Program, the younger kids usually do lots and lots of multiball, but this time we had them do footwork drills among themselves. For some of them, it was the first time they'd done footwork drills except with a coach, either live or multiball. They did Collapse

25/03/2019 - Tip of the Week Advanced Sponge but No-So-Fast Blades. USATT Committee Selection Task Force Did your eyes glaze over just reading that headline? I'm on the task force, along with Eric Wu and chair Gary Schlager. We had three teleconferences, sometimes joined by USATT board chair Anne Cribbs and USATT attorney Dennis Taylor. The purpose of the task force was to sort through the 45 people who had volunteered for 19 USATT committees and make recommendations for the USATT board on who should chair and be members of each committee. It was a herculean task, made much easier by the herculean efforts of Gary and Dennis, who kept us updated on all the needed info. This weekend the board will meet for two days in the Bay Area in California where they will, among other things, finalize and approve the committees for the next two years. As noted before, my latest two-year term as coaching chair ended recently, and Pieke Franssen has already been approved as the new coaching chair. I have Collapse

18/03/2019 - Tip of the Week Challenge an Opponent's Strength. USATT Election As I write this, I am a member of the USATT Board of Directors. However, very likely later today I will no longer be on it as they will be counting the ballots in the current election. (I chose not to run for re-election.) The result will be announced on the USATT news page, though I don't know for sure if it will go up today. (I'll link to it directly from here when it goes up.) The two candidates in the final runoff are Bruce Liu and Mike Babuin. While both have been sharply critical of USATT in many ways, I'm fine with either of them; I know I can talk to either of them. But that might not be the case for some of the people who they have criticized - there's going to be some friction involved with either of them. But maybe that's a good thing as it makes us really look at what we're doing. When I ran for the USATT Board, I made it clear that I wanted to focus on "Progressive" Collapse