Coaches of the Year:
Dan Seemiller & Masaaki Tajima

By Debbie Doney & Larry Hodges

Coach of the Year:  Dan Seemiller

Age: 46

Coach: Current U.S. Men’s National Team Coach since March 1998 … Head Coach of the South Bend Table Tennis Club … USATT’s Developmental Coach of the Year, 1998 … 1999 Pan Am Team Coach … 1999 World’s Team Coach … 2000 U.S. Olympic Men’s Team Coach

Leader: USATT President, 1990-95 … Director of countless tournaments, including the 1986 U.S. Nationals and numerous 4-star tournaments such as the Sun TV, Macy Block and St. Joseph Valley Opens

Player: 5-time U.S. Men’s Singles Champion … 11-times U.S. Men’s Doubles Champion … 6-times U.S. Mixed Doubles Champion … Quarterfinalist, Men’s Doubles, 1977 World Championships … Often ranked near the top 20 in the World in the late 1970s.

Hobbies: Golf, softball and staying in shape

Dan moved to South Bend in 1996 to coach at the 12-table South Bend Table Tennis Club, which is sponsored by the South Bend Parks and Recreation Department. Practice is held five times a week with Varsity, Junior Varsity, and Cadet teams. He currently coaches the South Bend Junior Program. Dan’s students include many of the best junior players in the U.S., with several achieving rankings in the top 10 for their age group. He currently coaches Mark Hazinski, the top Under 16 Junior in the U.S. Dan’s goal is to work with kids that are 11 to 15 years old, and send them to international tournaments and see if we can develop any stars from that group. He feels that if we do this over and over again, and let the kids know that if they do well they’ll get more trips, we’ll get the more serious kids involved. For the future he believes that they need to identify more players at an earlier age, and not wait until they are 17.

Dan is the only player in the world with a grip named after him – the "Seemiller grip," developed and used by Dan throughout his career. In the early 1980s, players with this grip dominated table tennis in the U.S., with four out of the five U.S. Team members (Dan, his brother Ricky, Eric Boggan and Brian Masters) using the grip at one point. Boggan, the highest ranked USA player of the past 25 years, learned most of the techniques of the grip from Dan – who himself was the second highest ranked USA player of the past 25 years. The grip, in which a player uses the same side of the racket for both backhand and forehand, is one of the three main grips used in table tennis.

Dan’s most recent accomplishments include being the coach of the Pan Am Men’s Team in 1999 where USA swept both events, men’s team and men’s singles.

Developmental Coach of the Year:  Masaki Tajima

• BA in Fine Arts, 1973

• Management Consultant, Hospitality Industry

• USATT Certified National Coach

Masaaki started playing table tennis at San Francisco State University in 1970 while majoring in Fine Arts. By 1976 he was a 2200 level player. Around that time, he was elected president of the San Francisco club, and his priorities changed from player to organizer. Although the club was the largest in Northern California, with many juniors playing, there were no coaches or program for them to participate in. Masaaki realized that if they wanted to maintain the growth, they needed a club coach and a coaching program. And since the association did not have a national coaching program at the time and coaches were hard to come by, especially a non-paid volunteer coach, he decided to become a coach.

As a self-taught player who studied tapes and went to virtually every tournament he could to learn, he became an effective coach. He believed that being a good player was secondary to being a good teacher. In 1979 he went to Japan to study coaching and took courses in sports psychology and human behavior.

In 1989, he founded the Sunset Table Tennis Club in San Francisco, with just two tables, primarily for the purpose of developing junior players. When the Nationals came to the University of California at Berkeley, it was a watershed event that changed the direction of his life. That year, two of his students won age events, his club was packed (still is) and the association asked him to start a coaching and school program in his region.

By 1993, 16 coaches had been recruited and certified, and many of them had started their own coaching programs. Some of the more successful were the Concord, Palo Alto and Daly City clubs. Currently, he has 24 adult and junior students.

Some Sunset Table Tennis Club achievements: 12 National, U.S. Open or Junior Olympic titles. Notable players who went through the Sunset training program include Peter Zajac, Mark Liu, Shashin Shodhan and Jackie Lee.