46^th World Table Tennis Championships

Osaka, Japan · April 23 - May 6, 2001

Friday, April 27, 2001
Day Five of the Worlds

By Larry Hodges

A lot happened today - the semifinals of Women's Teams, the quarterfinals of Men's Teams, and the USA team nearly wrapped up the team portion of the tournament, with the Women's team done (20th place) and the Men's Team with one more match on Saturday, a playoff between 39th and 40th place against Ukraine. However, nearly all of this was featured in the news section - so those stories are linked below.

Lots of discussion took place today on the new ITTF rules that will soon switch us to 11-point games and outlaw hidden serves (as demonstrated by Netherlands Star Trinko Keen).

This is probably the lowest showing the USA men's team has had in history - but it's partly because the stronger players sat out the latter matches to give younger players experience, and also because mainstays like Cheng Yinghua (not able to take this much time off from his coaching schedule) and Todd Sweeris (injured back during USA Team Trials and had to drop out) weren't here. Gosh darn it, with a little luck, we coulda been battling it out for the low 30s!

• Women's Semifinals
• Men's Quarterfinals
• USA Women's Team's Complete Results
• USA Men's Team's Results, with one match remaining
• The soon-to-be-outlawed hidden serve, demonstrated by Netherlands star Trinko Keen

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