Happiness is a back­hand place, a fore­hand smash, then a fore­hand kill.

My over­all table ten­nis game has final­ly been improv­ing, most­ly from play­ing against some provin­cial team play­ers and study­ing how they move. For the first two months I got back from Hong Kong I had no feel­ing for the ball. I’ve been try­ing to bal­ance myself out more, work­ing on my back­hand, which was my weak­ness, with­out sac­ri­fic­ing too much of my fore­hand, which was my strength. I was best at counter-dri­ving, but that’s cause I used to play a run­ning fore­hand game, which was extreme­ly risky. The prob­lem, I dis­cov­ered, was that I was almost nev­er in the ready stance, a bad habit I picked up when drilling. Now that I’ve achieved a much bet­ter bal­ance, I’ve become less aggres­sive but more ver­sa­tile.

Last week­end there was a train­ing course for lev­el 1 umpires in table ten­nis. It was dirt cheap, and only two hours long so I decid­ed to go for it. Out of the nine peo­ple who took the test, only three passed, includ­ing me. The test was open book, unlim­it­ed time, but the ques­tions were extreme­ly tricky. Since I passed, I can offi­ci­ate match­es for both club sanc­tioned tour­na­ments and provin­cial lev­el com­pe­ti­tions.

I went to the sec­ond league meet yes­ter­day, and it was def­i­nite­ly anoth­er expe­ri­ence. The diver­si­ty of all the play­ers is just amaz­ing. Their per­son­al­i­ties come out in every lit­tle detail, from their style of play, to how they lose a point, to how they serve.

There’s the team con­sist­ing most­ly of elder­ly ladies in their sweat pants, along with their lit­tle, sup­port­ive peanut gallery of friends who cheer and clap after every point. Sometimes the play­ers try to high five each oth­er when they get a good ral­ly in dou­bles, but end up shak­ing hands in a sort of awk­ward way. The most they ever say when they lose a point is, “Phooie!”, and fake an angry foot stomp, and are always the first ones to approach you for a hand shake. These are the ones who play social­ly, as some­thing to do on Sunday with their friends between what I’m guess­ing is tea and nap time.

On the oth­er end of the spec­trum, there are the play­ers who wear faces of dire aggres­sion as soon as the point starts, as if they’ll throw their pad­dles down and punch you in the face if you serve them an ace. These are the ones who intro­duce them­selves, state their provin­cial rank­ing, and imme­di­ate­ly ask for yours. They have no prob­lem with shout­ing one word exple­tives to release their frus­tra­tion when they’re los­ing, even when they’re play­ing next to the peanut gallery pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned. They don’t play for fun, they play to kick your ass.

Continue read­ing “Characters At A League Meet”…

Last week I signed up for the National Capital Region Table Tennis League. Teams are two to four mem­bers each, and play in a round robin over four months. Three match­es are played every week, and each match con­sists of two to four sin­gles sets and one dou­bles set. A prob­lem I have is that I start to hold back and doubt myself when I’m up against some­one I’ve nev­er played before, caus­ing me to lose my offen­sive con­trol game, the only thing I’m good at. I fig­ured that join­ing the league would be a good way to expose myself to dif­fer­ent play­ing styles, and get myself com­fort­able with play­ing new peo­ple.

We only played two match­es today, win­ning the first and los­ing the sec­ond. There’s quite a mix of skill lev­el there; from for­mer nation­al team play­ers turned nation­al team coach­es, to provin­cial junior team play­ers, to recre­ation­al ama­teurs, to begin­ners, to para­plegics. I’d say that peo­ple there are between 14 and 60 years of age.

Since I’m actu­al­ly either sweat­ing or sit­ting in my sweat for more than four hours there, I’m tempt­ed to start using anti-per­spi­rant again. I haven’t used any in over four years, since I don’t actu­al­ly smell very much when I sweat. I’ll take the fact that I still have friends (and have actu­al­ly been dat­ing) as con­fir­ma­tion of this belief.