At the risk of writing too much, let me give a concrete example of what is possible though again, not everyone who coaches can invest this kind of effort into a student. Of course, there is some boasting, but let me make the point.
For someone at your age, your blocking game must be extremely strong to beat better players who are younger unless you are a freakish athlete. So if I Was coaching you, I would do a lot of serve and push and make you serve short topspin/backspin/no spin and smash if the opponent pops it up and rally if they do not (most lower players do not have strong flick so you can do this reliably). And working on blocking the first loop against better players and then blocking successive loops so that someone has to hit 3 or 4 loops to break you. While I can't make you perfect, since I am 2000 USATT, I can make sure that by the time we are done, you have absolutely zero fear of blocking USATT 1700 loops. If you have good backhand hit, we will train it so that you can exchange confidently on the backhand diagonal and whoever beats you should be confident they can redirect or they have to hit more than 3 balls because you will be applying pressure with your consistency on the diagonal.
I coached a player around your age, even older, exactly this way, repeated serve and push and serve and block and sometimes he hits loose ball (initially, he was trying to hit everything, he didn't believe that just blocking was good enough to break down many players, but me I know from experience, I used to be a complete blocker). He had good short backhand topspin serve, I make him add backspin just for some free points, and he would attack to corners if he got a pop up.
He beat a 1700-1800 non-tournament player one day in the club, and the opponent blamed my coaching, saying that the guy knew how to touch a heavy ball and it wasn't easy to break him down with just one loop. But this is how hard real coaching can be, it is easy to feed someone lots of balls and make them look good. But table tennis is not figure skating, you get points for keeping the ball in play and making the opponent miss, not for looking good. If you are an adult learner trying to improve in the next year, if you are training hard, you have to train things that win points, you can't train like a player who wants to be good in 20 years time as a world class player. Learn to block people around and attack loose balls, don't focus on looking good unless you enjoy that more than winning (and it is your right to, I sometimes play more to look good than to win).
