Table Tennis Things I know…. is an interesting post by Greg Letts on the excellent tabletennis.about.com web site. Greg feels he would be a very much better player today if a number of now seemingly obvious things had dawned on him earlier in his career. Most of us in the POPPs team are returning to table tennis after longish breaks, in my case over 30 years, and are keen to make up for lost time. Some of Gregg’s tips are especially relevant for us, but not all. His advice to ‘start young’ is not too useful, to us at least!! The rest of his 10 tips however are worth serious consideration. In particular I found his observations on the importance of serving and returning serves very useful and reinforces my one observations and experience so far. Rather than complain about the low cunning of some opponents’ serves  learn to give as good as you get! Look for opportunities to play better players is another tip but of course that is exactly why we have joined the league – not with any expectation we will have immediate success, or very much at all to begin with, but because it is a sure fire way of playing against better players and improving.

The section on planning your training may be a little more controversial as he makes it clear that, in his opinion, it is not worth spending much time practicing strokes you are not going to use in a match. But surely you don’t play those strokes in matches because they are poor or you lack confidence in them and not practising them just means, obviously, they will not improve and you will never be able to play anything but your preferred game, win or lose. However, on thinking about this a little more I think it depends on what it is you want to achieve and why you are playing in the first place. There is no doubt that even our fairly restricted repertoire of strokes could be much improved and a great deal of progress can still be made just developing what we already have. As Gregg says, “you have more potential than you think” and I’m sure this is true of all of us. It just depends how far you want to develop that potential. Personally I want to get as good as I can get within the constraints of my time, other commitments and boredom threshold if I play too much. I’m aiming for about twice a week on average. I would prefer an all round game where I can vary the style of play, tactics and shots, if possible but this will depend on good coaching, another of Greg’s tips. We are very fortunate we have this already thanks to Alan.