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Bob Fox had arrived late the night before, and the uniforms were now available for the players. We headed down to breakfast at around 8AM, and took the bus at 9:30 AM to the playing hall for the first of two practice sessions that day. I went with them – my first order of business was getting my Internet connection set up so I could start putting up reports such as this one. I was finally able to do that late in the morning.

After the morning practice, we all went to lunch in the huge cafeteria, with many of the top stars in the sport eating there. Afterwards, most of us watched the others teams practice. In particular, there was a Korean coach who was hitting with the Korean players, changing partners every 15 minutes or so. He was a penholder with a backhand block that was downright unbelievable. No matter what the other player did, he’d get blocked down, with most rallies ending with a jab-block winner off what seemed a winning loop.

The players commented a number of times about the slowness of the conditions, probably caused by the flooring and the tables. They said that if you drop shot the ball, the ball just stopped. "Danny, you’d be king here!" Barney J. Reed told Coach Seemiller, who was known during his playing career for his change-up dead blocks with antispin.

Many of the Japanese seemed to know Coach Seemiller. It’s no wonder – Dan won the Western Japan Open five times, and was in the final four other times! (This was at a time when there was no Japan Open, so the Western Japan Open was their biggest tournament, their de facto Open.)

Team USA had a second practice from 2-4:00 PM. While they practiced, I had a long discussion with Yugoslavian Coach Zoran Djokic, who would be giving a presentation the next day at the ITTF Sports Science Congress on "Differences caused with the new 40mm ball in structure of competitive Activities of top table tennis players." He lamented about their association’s lack of money, with annual budget now of around $20,000. And USATT struggles with a near million dollar budget!

Afterwards, some of us stayed to watch the Swedes practice. Watching Jan-Ove Waldner and Jorgen Persson practice deserves its own article!

The other excitement of the day was when two Croatian players got into a fight at the playing hall – broken up by Zoran Primorac. Shortly afterwards, we headed back to the hotel and dinner, and a relatively quiet night in our rooms.

As we head into this Worlds, we look at the experience brought to the table for Team USA – a total of 58 World Championships (including this one) between the 10 players and two coaches. The actual numbers: Zhuang-5, Hazinski-1, Owens-4, B.Reed-4, Jain-1, Gao-6, J.Reed-6, Banh-5, Sung-4, Yang-2, Seemiller-12 (8 as player, 4 as coach), and Gheorghe-8 (4 as player, 4 as coach).

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