I am one of those juniors. I am the cause of some old guys broken rackets. The thing is, kids and adults should be kept seperate. I feel sometimes it's insulting to the sport when a 15 year old who goes to the gym 4 days a week like me has close matches with a 300 pound 60 year old with junk rubber who doesn't move an inch. My club is not very kid friendly. In fact during a league, one guy smacked the ball at me when I choed at deuce in the 4th game. All the time, middle-aged guys complain that I cheat when I beat them or they start serving so illegally and then get really mad when I call a let and then i get reprimanded for poor sportsmanship by the club owner.
You raise some legitimate points, Lermanator. If the older players at the Cleveland, Ohio tt club had not been willing to encourage me and practice with me, a 19 year old novice to competitive table tennis as it was played back in the early 1960s with hard rubber rackets, I might have concluded oh the hell with it, continued with tennis as my favorite racquet sport, and in time have become a self-taught 4.5 level tennis player instead of the 4.25 level tennis player I ended up as (a rating of 7.0 points is that of a professional).
Now it seems as though older players and younger players are coming at one another from different universes. And the results are not altogether pretty. Older players complain that younger players with superior reflexes, access to training that was pretty much nonexistent when they started to play, whip them regularly, even if only age 10, despite their years of experience but lack of coaching.
Younger players complain with some credence that older players neither understand nor respect that they are the future of the sport, and if well behaved and sportsman (or sportswoman)- or sportsboy and sportsgirl-like they should be welcomed to table tennis, not discouraged from playing it.
The dilemma of who respects whom is further compounded by the fact that most older players do not have the footwork or stroke technique, if indeed they ever had, or the reflexes that younger players do. Thus antispin and long pipped rubbers, the "junk" rubbers so bewildering and discouraging to younger players not yet used to coping with them. You are not going to find many 60+ year old players using Tenergy, Hurricane, Bluefire, or any spring sponge rubber. Older players may be slower afoot, lacking a forehand loop kill or chiquita flip or forcing return of a forehand loose grip pendulum serve, but they're not stupid, and they are only too well aware of their table tennis limitations.
