Helen from POPPS attended our Tuesday session today and had a knock. Apart from various documents we need to fill in to get the team properly set up so we can apply for funding, she has also provided a couple of CDs full photos of session members for the web site. Some of these will appear in a new picture section of this web site in due course.

At the session this morning our coach Alan gave us a short talk on the League Rules. There are 5 only (4 more then Fight Club).

1. 3 in a team
2. Max 6 registered team members
3. At the HTT Centre matches must start at 7.15pm and be finished by 9.45. (Since there will be 9 best of 5 games matches we may have to use 2 tables to ensure finishing on time).
4. Matches must be run according to the National TTA match rules (i.e. 2 serves, first to 11 or 2 clear points, serving rules etc.)
5. If a Halifax Centre team is short of a player for a match then we can play a member of another Halifax Centre team of the same division or lower. No player can play the same team more than 3 times. So if a player has played a team twice (home and away) for his or her own team, they can only be a guest player for another team against the same team once.

Alan also announced that all is in place to start the Thursday morning sessions in September.

Speaking or the rules, I found something out today I didn’t know. When I played in the 70s if you hit a ball on the volley, i.e. before it has bounced on your side of the net, you lose a point. You lost a point irrespective of where the ball is when you hit it. The rule change many years ago and now if the ball is past the end ot the table and you volley it you do not now lose a point. Your opponent does of course as they have failed to hit your end of the table with their shot. I need to check what happens if you volley a ball after it has crossed the side of the table without bouncing. I assume this is the same. Clarification would be welcome.

Helen is going to give the POPPs team a big writeup in the next POPP Halifax Neighbourhood Newsletter (circ. many dozens) and has asked me to write something. This will be a good opportunity to get some more recruits for Tuesdays and Thursdays. I would like to draft something and pass it on to other members for amendment and/or comment. For instance, Robin is very experienced in writing stuff like this. I will ask Helen what the deadline is. Hopefully the Newsletter item will give this web site a plug and the 2 coaching sessions at the Centre. At just £2 they are great value. And if we can get more recruits for the POPP coaching sessions, hopefully some more women too, we may be able to think about forming a second team in due course.

Today a new page has been added to the site that lists articles about table tennis in news papers and other media that are available on line and may interest visitors to this web site. The page, called  Table tennis in the news, is listed in the Pages section in the side bar menu. Hopefully we will add new items as we come across them. Suggestions always welcome, preferably with the web address of the article.

We have a full complement of 6 players now David has joined us. We have 2 members who are experienced players and 4 comparative beginners from which we have to field a team of 3 players each week. Given our intention to share the matches as evenly as we can between us, the overall strength of the team will vary week by week with some match teams made up entirely of beginners. We would still expect to win the odd match as we will have surprise on our side. The other teams are not likely to have seen anything like this before! Now David has joined us the plot to recruit Helen as the 6th team player is on the back burner for the moment but we do have a vacancy for a masseuse and motivational coach she may be interested in. What do yout think Helen!? It would probably be a good idea to have a paramedic in attendance too! At the moment the Tuesday session does not have any regular female members which is a pity. If we can find a way of attracting women to the group hopefully we will be able to reflect this in the team membership.

After a fair bit of messing about (this web site uses a blogging and content management system called WordPress that I am struggling to learn) and consulting a useful book called ‘WordPress for Dummies’ we have got this web site up and running.

We have made good progress in the last week. Some of us had been thinking about forming a team for some time now, encouraged by Alan, but we have been a bit nervous about the idea, concerned about our standard of play and the time commitment in particular. However, Helen of POPP, who sponsors the Tuesday morning over 50s coaching sessions, came along to our session last week and offered to support us and her evident enthusiasm for the project swept us along.

We have nearly got the 6 players that, ideally, we need – 5 so far. Derek, Mieszek, Robin and myself, Terry, are relatively novice players but we are fortunate to have John joining us, an experienced player who has been round the TT League block a number of times and whose help and advice will be invaluable. There is a plot to persuade Helen to make up the full 6 – we live in hopes. Mieszek is our Team Secretary and Robin (who doesn’t know this yet as he went on holiday before we decided to go ahead with the team) is our Social Secretary. I have set up this web site so I suppose I am nominally the IT person but the point of choosing WordPress for the web site is that all the team players can be contributors and will be able to post news items and update pages very easily. Hopefully this will mean the site will be kept up-to-date. We shall see! We should be able to report shortly that the forms have been filled in, the team fully recruited and our intensive(?) training programme will have commenced. It may end in tears of course, but the journey should be exciting and it will keep us off the streets.