@UpsideDownCarl : To respond to your last two posts , and I am just going to call them, "Is coaching fees too much" , "Wasting time playing people below your level" , did not want to quote too keep it short and readable ....
Coaching Fees :
1. There is an important difference between what you teach and coaching table tennis . Yes , you improve posture , it helps a lot of people improve their quality of life and every little improvement is a gain and a reason for happiness and people are looking inside to feel the improvement , but its not attached to something as external as a "win or loss" or "starting to get more points off better players" or even "USATT rating points" . When you have a commonly accepted metric attached to it, people are going to use it as yardstick , which is sometimes detrimental to the whole process but whether you like it or not, you can't ignore it. And being a professional coach one should not ignore it as well.
2. There are two kinds of people who come for coaching as adults , there are people, mostly elderly who have disposable, lets call it, fortune ,and they are happy to hit an hour with an universally accepted high level coach instead of a practice partner without improving anything in their game. They derive pleasure out of it and its totally fine for both parties as long as it is understood what they are doing.
Then there are adults who go to the coaches with a tangible outcome in mind, and more often than not people like to say I want to improve my technique rather than saying something as straight as I want to win more , but as a coach you should to get it out of people at the onset on what their goals are. Now what do you do when you see the learning curve is not as steep as you expected or the improvement is not as good as it is supposed to be ? It could be something to do with the potential of the player , his or her learn-ability or physical handicaps . But how do you draw the line as to whether its because of that or because of your inability to coach adults because may be you did not learn the game as an adult ? I feel that this introspection is lacking in a lot of such high profile coaches ... and I don't mean to take anything away from them , they are perfectly great coaches who can and will bring up more and more kids but if they don't know how to fix adult issues they should at least try some other approaches and thats where I feel there is a stark lack of professionalism. They just simply keep blocking the ball to the same damn place and you keep making the same mistakes. You tell them I am not able to feel the ball on my backhand and they don't want to switch you to a softer rubber because their sponsors don't have a good soft rubber , you tell them I can't spin the damn plastic ball with this world's best rubber and they would not tell you to try a tacky rubber to improve your touch . It could be a purposeful ignorance or just plain ignorance about whats going on elsewhere but at the end of the day it not fair to the person paying you close to 10 grands a year for coaching .
Time wasted :
If I go to the club to play for 2 hours and I already don't have somebody fixed to play with , I will play with anybody who is there but only for the duration of the time I was plannig to be the there. Anytime you are doing something else than what you planned for its practically wasting time and frustrating at the end of the day or the next day, and it could be even be playing a higher level player, time lost is time lost even if you gained something which you did not want in the first place , isn't it ?
