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TLDR?= What made you stick with table tennis?
Where I live there's two main clubs for table tennis.
One of which is very welcoming full of players from ratings 2000 to 500. -We'll call this one Nice club (about 10 tables here)
The other of which has higher level players from about 1600-2200. -We'll call this Experienced club (about 12 tables here)
Anyway, every week or two I see a new player or two come to the club excited to play and improve. It's rare that the player will actually come back weekly and make this a life-long hobby. Or even put the time in to get to a moderately decent level. The worst thing is when these new players come to the "experienced" club. because none of the experienced players want to play with them. It's not just that the players are bad. It's because the experienced player has put countless hours into the game and to play with these player's its just giving them free lessons to someone that they will MOST LIKELY never see again. Now this is kind of a two edged sword here; maybe the new player would have stuck with the sport and kept coming back if the experienced players actually seemed to give a crap about them.
I tend to invite new players to come with me to the "Nice club" where they're a lot more welcoming and friendly. But even the players that go to the nice club never stick around for too many more visits. Which got me thinking to when I first joined the clubs. When I first joined I felt people were extremely kind to me and really took me under their wing hitting with me EVERY time i came back, without me even having to put my paddle down on their table.
My question is. What got you to stick with table tennis and not move on when you realized it was difficult to get good at? Maybe it was the challenge or the excercize? Let me Know
?MY STORY
my passions constantly changed. My friends would get into something and i would get into them a lot more than them. Either I improved much quicker than them at whatever hobby it was or i just put more time into the hobby and had more motivation i would soon be way out of their league in whatever hobby it was and that's when i would lose interest.
When I started table tennis, about 3 years ago was the first time picking up a paddle. It was in the dorm i was living at in my university. There were 3 "good players" (probably under 1000 USATT thinking back now) but to me they were AMAZING. I had to get better than them. I loved playing so much at the time, i probably got about 6-8 hours in a day, I was known as the ping pong guy even though i wasn't the best there until the end of the semester.
Here's the order of them from worst to best.
Worst: A chinese student studying abroad, he used his forehand for EVERYTHING all he did was smash the ball but it looked like a looping stroke, and that's what i truly wanted my game to look like. He was the worst out of the three but the way he played, made me think he was the best for a long while.
Middle: A Girl named Katie. This was probably one of the biggest reasons i really got into the game. She stood completely still on the table, almost never moving her feet but would block everything with easy. I liked her a bit so i really enjoyed playing with her and trying to get to her level. We got along pretty well but fell out of touch along the way somewhere. (To this day I never did beat her). It's one of my biggest regrets in table tennis, having those players that smoked you when you were bad and knowing you'll never have a chance to smoke them back. Me and her always played to 21. I still remember her getting me at 21-0 once. (ouch i know) but we still had fun.
Best: This guy's name was Robert, still a close friend of mine to this day but he doesn't play anymore. His style was more of a blocking/countering style, but he adapted very well and could find his opponents weaknesses very easily to exploit them. To this day I'm convinced that if he stuck with the game the way I did he would be at least a couple hundred points higher than me. He has that natural focus in games and is very intelligent and is able to learn extremely quickly.
Then one day a Chinese man named David came to the dorm and played. Robert was just smiling because he knew i would want to play him and he knew i was going to get destroyed. David was the head of the table tennis club at the college I went to (I never did go though, mostly because it met at the rec center about the long distance of HALF a mile away). He was only rated about 1650 but I'd never seen someone play the way he did and i was simply amazed. I had a new goal for the game. I had to get to THAT level.
I occasionally see David at local clubs these days and i can usually almost always beat him. He doesn't seem to be trying though. I guess it's one of those things where if you start playing with someone when they're under 1000 rating and you're that much better it's hard to ever take them seriously.
Anyway after going to clubs I started testing equipment and "feeling" the ball in different ways. I got a coach who I've been seeing once or twice a week for about a year and have been improving at an alarming rate lately.
Where I live there's two main clubs for table tennis.
One of which is very welcoming full of players from ratings 2000 to 500. -We'll call this one Nice club (about 10 tables here)
The other of which has higher level players from about 1600-2200. -We'll call this Experienced club (about 12 tables here)
Anyway, every week or two I see a new player or two come to the club excited to play and improve. It's rare that the player will actually come back weekly and make this a life-long hobby. Or even put the time in to get to a moderately decent level. The worst thing is when these new players come to the "experienced" club. because none of the experienced players want to play with them. It's not just that the players are bad. It's because the experienced player has put countless hours into the game and to play with these player's its just giving them free lessons to someone that they will MOST LIKELY never see again. Now this is kind of a two edged sword here; maybe the new player would have stuck with the sport and kept coming back if the experienced players actually seemed to give a crap about them.
I tend to invite new players to come with me to the "Nice club" where they're a lot more welcoming and friendly. But even the players that go to the nice club never stick around for too many more visits. Which got me thinking to when I first joined the clubs. When I first joined I felt people were extremely kind to me and really took me under their wing hitting with me EVERY time i came back, without me even having to put my paddle down on their table.
My question is. What got you to stick with table tennis and not move on when you realized it was difficult to get good at? Maybe it was the challenge or the excercize? Let me Know
?MY STORY
my passions constantly changed. My friends would get into something and i would get into them a lot more than them. Either I improved much quicker than them at whatever hobby it was or i just put more time into the hobby and had more motivation i would soon be way out of their league in whatever hobby it was and that's when i would lose interest.
When I started table tennis, about 3 years ago was the first time picking up a paddle. It was in the dorm i was living at in my university. There were 3 "good players" (probably under 1000 USATT thinking back now) but to me they were AMAZING. I had to get better than them. I loved playing so much at the time, i probably got about 6-8 hours in a day, I was known as the ping pong guy even though i wasn't the best there until the end of the semester.
Here's the order of them from worst to best.
Worst: A chinese student studying abroad, he used his forehand for EVERYTHING all he did was smash the ball but it looked like a looping stroke, and that's what i truly wanted my game to look like. He was the worst out of the three but the way he played, made me think he was the best for a long while.
Middle: A Girl named Katie. This was probably one of the biggest reasons i really got into the game. She stood completely still on the table, almost never moving her feet but would block everything with easy. I liked her a bit so i really enjoyed playing with her and trying to get to her level. We got along pretty well but fell out of touch along the way somewhere. (To this day I never did beat her). It's one of my biggest regrets in table tennis, having those players that smoked you when you were bad and knowing you'll never have a chance to smoke them back. Me and her always played to 21. I still remember her getting me at 21-0 once. (ouch i know) but we still had fun.
Best: This guy's name was Robert, still a close friend of mine to this day but he doesn't play anymore. His style was more of a blocking/countering style, but he adapted very well and could find his opponents weaknesses very easily to exploit them. To this day I'm convinced that if he stuck with the game the way I did he would be at least a couple hundred points higher than me. He has that natural focus in games and is very intelligent and is able to learn extremely quickly.
Then one day a Chinese man named David came to the dorm and played. Robert was just smiling because he knew i would want to play him and he knew i was going to get destroyed. David was the head of the table tennis club at the college I went to (I never did go though, mostly because it met at the rec center about the long distance of HALF a mile away). He was only rated about 1650 but I'd never seen someone play the way he did and i was simply amazed. I had a new goal for the game. I had to get to THAT level.
I occasionally see David at local clubs these days and i can usually almost always beat him. He doesn't seem to be trying though. I guess it's one of those things where if you start playing with someone when they're under 1000 rating and you're that much better it's hard to ever take them seriously.
Anyway after going to clubs I started testing equipment and "feeling" the ball in different ways. I got a coach who I've been seeing once or twice a week for about a year and have been improving at an alarming rate lately.
