Sunset Table Tennis Club

Coach Masaaki Tajima and club members discuss their play at the Nationals.

On most Saturdays around noon except at tournament time, you’ll find parents and adult players weeping and mopping the large wooden floor of the auditorium at the Glen Park Recreation Center in San Francisco, and then setting up the four Butterfly tables and barriers.

Meanwhile, a bevy of 10- to 16-year-old players are stripping the rubber off of their paddles, scraping off yesterday’s residue, and carefully applying speed glue and rubber for today’s training and matches. The youngsters are also kibitzing around about what happened since they were last together.

Masaaki Tajima is not kibitzing around. As a certified national coach, and recently named USATT Developmental Coach of the Year, he surveys his brood on hand and plans the day’s activities – the lessons to be taught, the specific workouts for each of his players, the weekend pairings – and makes meticulous notes on his ever-present legal pad.

Tajima is not a lawyer, he’s more of a judge – a judge of the player’s strengths and weaknesses, of what it takes to motivate them, to improve their playing ability, and to discover whether they have the heart and desire to want to grow in their games. Even more important, he looks at each of his players as an individual and tries to translate his lessons for playing table tennis into lessons for living life.

He believes in excellence through personal development; winning is secondary.

For the 30 members of the Sunset Table Tennis Club (STTC), who range in age from 10 to 65, Tajima is their coach, leader, harshest critic and greatest supporter, and with the younger members nationally ranked in their age group, the STTC has come a long way in 12 years.

Tajima began playing at the San Francisco Table Tennis Club in 1970, and when he became president in 1976 he began to promote and organize the club. He saw the need for a program for juniors and went to Japan for three months in 1979 to learn coaching techniques to bring home.

The STTC came into being in 1989, and Tajima organized the activities, created standards and philosophies which he has refined through the years. As the program grew, the STTC moved to Glen Park in 1995, and Tajima spent his own money and bought new tables for the club. Through the years Tajima has coached such top juniors as Mark Liu, Jackie Lee, Peter Zajac and Shashin Shodham. The club’s current youngsters have seen their ratings rise as they have grown as human beings.

And the growth is family style. Misha Kazantsev and his mother Yelena Karshtedt, a USATT referee, won Under 3200 Doubles at the North American Open in San Francisco. Misha came to the club in 1997 as a beginner and his now rated over 2100. At the last U.S. Nationals in Las Vegas, Misha won Under 2000, finished second in Boys’ Primary School Singles, and made the semifinals of Under 2100.

The Phung family are also regulars at the STTC, with 10-year-old Robert, 12-year-old Keven (whose rating has doubled in his 18 months at the club to over 1600), and 16-year-old Karen, who made the semifinals of Under 1200 at the 2000 Nationals.

Siblings Karen and John Springer have also raised the level of their games, with John making the final of Under 500 and the semifinals of Under 800 at the 2000 Nationals. Sisters Minh Thanh and Minh Chau, along with their father Hai Nguyen, have trained regularly at the club since 1999.

Tajima tries to help each player improve as a person, teaching and motivating them to grow mentally, emotionally, physically and technically – and in that order. At the end of each weekend session, the players gather around as Tajima bluntly reviews their play and their attitude, and after a tournament, they are given typed sheets analyzing their performance.

"I approach coaching in the same light as parenting," said Tajima. "You feed, clean,

educate the child, give them the right direction, so at some point you can be confident they can go out on their own. Part of raising this self confidence is self-reliance, but you can’t teach it. You have to let go, and let them experience self-awareness."

From their marked improvement on the tables and in their young lives, the lessons they receive at the STTC have been successful.