[ Warning: Incoming wall of not that good formatted text. ]
Preface
Due to the fact that I don't know Liam Pitchford that well in general nor personal I'll just give you my personal experience about the factors a young player needs to climb the ladders up and how they correlate to each other.
[1] Location
[2] Timing
[3] Parental support
[4] Intercessor & mentor (not necessary to be the same person)
[5] Player itself with the important points:
[5.1] Character
[5.2] Stature
[5.3] Fitness (strength / flexibility)
[5.4] Coordination
[5.5] Eye (faculty of sight / range of vision)
[5.6] Lack of health / personal life drawbacks
[5.7] Stage of life / which part of life is TT
[5.8] Ratio: talent / training / playing style
Explanation
[1]
It starts with your country and if TT is a popular sport or not, which results in more or less developed infrastructures in terms of the density / professionality of training centers and the administration. You'll always have better possibilities in countries with good infrastructures.
If your player is lucky to be situated to next to a big training center it's all fine but if not, he's dependant of other factors, especially his parents.
As famous example take Timo Boll who has to be driven a couple hours a couple times per week by his parents to an adequate training hall.
If the players parents are not willing to do this, they might be willing to pay for tt colleges if they exist, but this is also a big thread for the young player itself and not all are mentally stable enough to do this.
Worst case for a young player is probably if he can just participate trainings he can walk to or bicycle to or if his parents aren't able to pay fees of any kind.
[2]
Timing here refers to a period of time or time frame where the player is able to get better
and succeed in his region.
Important here is the amount of opponents or players in general and the amount of better / even opponents at local rankings.
To give an example for the first point, it's of course easier to become a top 20 player in Belgium than a chinese top 20 player due to the massive player base in China if we just focus on numbers. It's more propable to have 5 good players in a million players than in 20 players to exaggerate it a bit.
The remaining point might be illustrated in a good way if you imagine that your player in every local ranking he would participate, face the young Waldner, Xu Xin, Ma Long and only the first three would climb the ladder up. Of course he wouldn't have to play against them too long because they won't play low ladders over a long time but just imagine your player would always be the unlucky fourth person.
Even if this just contains him two years, his optimal frame for a needed fast development to reach the top is more or less gone.
You could argue here that if the players isn't able to beat the first three he isn't ready for higher leagues / ranked games but who of your players might have won against the above triple? Additionally to reach the top your player has to be ready at a certain time for certain steps and if this process is prolonged through whatever circumstances he might end his development at the age of 40 to make use of exeggerations a second time.
[3]
Although kind of self-explaining I'd like to point out a few things. Parents have to provide time,money and mental support for a young player throughout his young career.
Especially the way of punishment parents used to give the player if he doesn't fullfill expectations at school or in terms of his private behaviour is critical . Luckily I never had to deal with parents dealing physical punishments to their kids but a real common issue is to forbid him to attend training / matches because of bad school marks or because they don't help with the housework. In particular the first point results most of the time in an downward spiral and neither helps/changes the parents nor the player. Most of the parents I spoke to with their children changed their behaviour afterwards.
[4]
Young players don't have the ability to change nor the insight to internal processes of their TT administration. Hence it's important to have an intercessor for the player who believes in the player and is willing to use his knowledge to throw away rocks in the players path he isn't even aware of. This might range from registration dates to convincing other club members to give this player a special support.
The mentor can be a trainer, local player or an international star, simply everyone who increases/maintains the players passion for table tennis. As a personal side note, I don't think the trainer has to be somewhat nice / charismatic etc. , just professional. It's even not necessary that the player likes the coach, he'll acknowledge him by time if the advices he gives leads to an improvement of the player. That's the point where the player builds trust which is the most important thing between a trainer and player.
[5.1]
Just a few keypoints on this topic. Most important is probably the mental stability, the ability to concentrate to the point, the attention span and the ability fade out factors that might worsen his game.
In my opinion mental stability mainly covers to keep calm while playing hard game situations / infront of a big audience and big tournaments or short: to endure any kind of stress.
To give an example of some common but not well known / mentioned stress sources for young players playing versus older players:
- The oppenent nearly smashes the players hand during the hand shake
- The opponent shouts ( content doesnt matter ranges from "choo!" over self insults to "he just wins because of this/that" ).
- The opponent criticizes the players counting( by the way he counts / the voice level ) which leads to a junior which from now on just focus on fullfilling all of the opponents counting wishes and not paying attention to the next ball. This is pretty effective from the opponents side of view and every young player has to be prepared before a match by his coach of this kind of mental tricks.
- The opponent exploits his stature and wildly uses his arm while complaining about his game, maybe throws his blade or the ball away and often passes the net line to get into the young players zone (still in anger) for picking up balls. Again this behaviour should be known to the young player by previous coaching sessions and if necessary the coach needs to speak to the opponent.
To the fade-out argument, a player should never worry about the circumstances he has to play under at this moment. This might be too less space,bad light situation, loud audience, temperature, humidity or whatever a player doesnt like to play under because it draws away the attention from the ball.
[5.2]
As usual the taller the better and he shouldn't weight a ton. The weight aspect changed a bit from my coaching beginnings, a couple of years ago we mainly had really thin players which had problems building up leg muscles. Now we get mainly players with a little overweight which get muscles more easily and got tendons / joints which are used to more mass due to the previous overweight which becomes muscle mass over training periods. It seems we getting more people of one bodytype we didn't get before ( google for bodytypes for more information ).
[5.3]
I won't repeat all different kinds of muscles involved / needed to play table tennis but focus on the flexibility aspect.
Especially while learning the weight transfer for the forehand loop I often see juniors struggle not because of the lack of balance or leg strength but the restricted flexibility of the hips with all of it needed muscles.
[5.4]
Just another short remark to this one. The big names of ball sports most of the times also excel at other ball sports so include some soccer or volleyball / floorball exercises from time to time in your training schedule as an indicator of talent.
[5.7]
The stage of life mainly refers to the stage of puberty but not entirely. Important are the first girlfriends of the player and the remaining time for table tennis and on what he sets his focus. Most crucial are the future plans of the player and a good backup plan. If a player wants to study a time intensive subject like chemistry or physics he'll probably not reach a high TT level and the same applies vice versa. Indeed not many top players got a high school-leaving qualification. It's a coached duty to sensitize the player about this issue and to prepare a plan B incase the player doesn't succeed as suspected in table tennis. Most of the civil career paths should still be open for the player.
[5.8]
As a rule of thumb most talented players tend to be more lazy than not so gifted players. However both types of players should be reminded that they could lose to each other if they dont train properly and that talent or a current lead might not last forever. The playstyle is often suited to this category. Talented players tend to do just as much as needed which leads to blocking, counter playing, good serving kind of players like Waldner who most of the time did exactly the above. In comparison, not that talented players tend to play like a two winged attacking machine on speed with an extensive training routine but most of the time without dangerous serves nor alternative playing styles if a player outplays him.
Conclusion or TL;DR
Without a proper environment your player can be as talented as possible but he still won't rise. Under environment I'd like to sum all above points. The level a player can achieve given an optimal environment depends on his training and his talent. Talent sets the total upper bound whereas the training style and workload determines how fast he reaches this bound.
Keep in mind that this is just my personal coaching experience and in no way scientifically proven. If you want to read scientific papers about this subject or table tennis tennis in general I'd suggest to take a look at the ITTF site.
However, be warned that a properly choosen sample size or reproducibility is not given in most of the table tennis research papers and thus such "results" may not be set in stone.
Due to the fact that we live at the age of big data I'm not worried that this poor basis will last forever.
Guess the post length escalated quickly during writing
, hope you still get some points for you out of it.