USATT’s Coaching Tour in Northern New England

By Doug Haynes

Participants in the New England clinic. Photo by John Olapurath, ©2002.

Northern New England might not seem a hotbed of table tennis. I doubt you can find a single player from this area in the magazine’s lists of top 15 players in any age category.  But due to the development of dynamic clubs in the region, interest in table tennis is expanding rapidly.  New Hampshire and Vermont now rank third and fourth nationally in the percentage of USATT members relative to the total population (see www.mdttc.com).

There have, however, been serious constraints on the development of our players. Most of the juniors in this area practice in rather isolated circumstances without coaches or other players of their age, and they often reach a plateau in the 1700-2000 level after they become the top players in their home clubs. A few juniors have met this situation by traveling to clinics in Maryland, New Jersey and Indiana.  At the same time, our clubs have tried from time to time to bring in coaches like Cheng Yinghua, Jack Huang, Barney Reed, Sr. and Liang Liung for summer clinics.  But these few instances have hardly been sufficient to satisfy the most highly motivated juniors or adults.

Coach Doru. Photo by John Olapurath, ©2002.

Thus when we first heard about the USATT’s coaching tour with Doru Gheorghe, the U.S. Women’s coach, we thought that the program seemed a perfect fit with our area.  We just needed to provide a space, participants, and sufficient financing to cover the coach’s hotel and local transport expenses.  For our players, the clinic would cost a fraction of what it would cost to travel out of the region or to hire a coach to come in on our own.

We needed to do a summer clinic, since interested juniors were too dispersed over the region to try anything after school.  After much searching for summertime space, we found the Rosa Tyson gym in South Strafford, VT.  This was a unique location for table tennis, a converted New England church with stained glass windows and traditional steeple in an idyllic village setting.

The newly formed Upper Valley Table Tennis Club and the Windsor Vermont Stiga Table Tennis Club co-sponsored our application.  Within a short time of sending it off, we heard from Debbie Moya, the USATT Programs Director, that Coach “Doru” (as we came to know him) would be giving us a clinic from July 13th-17th. We moved fast from this point, bringing together players, tables and finally the coach in a frenzied period of activity. 

The players came from 13 different towns and 6 different clubs in Vermont, New Hampshire, New York and Massachusetts. They possessed a variety of playing levels, from 450 to 1900. Included were promising juniors 12 and under (Hao Yang, Anisa Mohammed, Jonathan Covell and Frank Huang), older juniors with some experience in tournaments (Tom Haynes, Mike Caplan and Tim Aikey), two college-aged players (Ron Choy and Ken Cameron) and five highly motivated seniors. Most of the junior players stayed in our home for four nights.

Coach Doru devised a plan that suited this diverse collection of players superbly. An article on the Rhode Island clinic in the May/June magazine gives a good idea of the program, so I won’t repeat the details.  From the first day he tried to get us to stop using long pushes to return serves, focusing on trying drop shots, flips and loops.  Many of the players had never attempted a flip before, but by the end of the week, we were all integrating this shot into our games.  All the players worked hard on looping, including three juniors who had never looped before.

Doru was a stern taskmaster, and worked us hard from beginning to end with 5-6 hours a day of footwork drills and stroke practice.  He moved from table to table, critiquing the performance of every player.  All the players came to prize highly any words of praise! The culmination of the clinic came on the fifth day with multiball practice. Everyone got to work on a stroke or footwork drill as Doru fed them hundreds of balls.

Though Doru cautioned against too high expectations of immediate improvement, many of the participants had visibly raised the levels of their games.  In the session after the clinic, one young player beat another older junior (a non-participant) for the first time, prompting the older boy to ask us for advice on his game. So the effect of the clinic spread quickly. We somewhat rashly promised Doru that the participants in the clinic would improve an average of 200 points in the next year and we plan to give him updates on our progress!

We want to thank Coach Doru for coming to teach us and doing such an excellent job, Debbie Moya for the work of coordinating the clinic, Dana Adams for providing some tables, Danya Budiman for serving as a hitting partner for some of the juniors, and Jim Sweeney and the Strafford Athletic Association for arranging the use of the gym.  We especially want to encourage the USATT to keep this great program going.  We recommend it highly to other areas with high interest but without high-quality local coaches. Indeed, the USATT may see an application from us again in the near future!