How should I Coach someone in a match?

AgentHEX wrote: It's pretty hilarious that people can so easily accept simple one-size-fits-all solutions during a match scenario which is far more diagnostic/dynamic in nature, and set on bespoke solutions in an educational role in the other thread.

AgentHEX wrote: pingpongpaddy wrote: jrscatman wrote: I would like to know what type of spins are on the serves that's giving me trouble. This is where I lose a lot of points - it would be great if my coach could shed some light on this. When I'm asked to coach - if the players winning - give water, doing a great job keep it up! If they are loosing - give water, breathe, move your feet, relax and hit your shots - don't be tentative and play your game! Hi catman unfortunately, its too complicated to explain service spins in the 60 seconds of a time out, and anyway the opponent will just do a different serve. All the coach can do is encourage you to hit through the spin with confidence You need to work on your service return before the tournament really. After all service and return are the most important shots in the game. This entirely depends on how the player understand spin. If they can generally figure out the spin in a few sec after losing the point, explaining the one they can't shouldn't be too much of a challenge in a minute. If anything, quick fixes like serve spin or other quick adjustments to be conscience of bad habits or avoid the opponents' game plan are just about the only things that can be explained briefly. Even the player's own game plan should be prepped beforehand to be effective. Even more critically, for players who're still developing (ie looking to improve), instructions as if they're pros where every win matters over the learning experience are misguided anyway.

Its only too obvious that you lack experience in this area and can only contribute waffle

AgentHEX wrote: Would you say you have more of this "experience" than jt99sf or less?

I don't know about him.
My first tournament match was 1964
The first time I coached from the bench was 1968.
I have been doing both ever since.
go figure!!

Your remarks on the other hand are just empty theorising. Be humble for once and learn from the honest good sense of posters like APW46, Jkillashark, Baal, wturber, to name a few and even myself.
You might be able to give an interesting talk on the technique of giving the illusion of experience while having little, but in the area of tt coaching and tactics, all of us who have done it, know that you haven't had any experience worth speaking of.

pingpongpaddy wrote: AgentHEX wrote: Would you say you have more of this "experience" than jt99sf or less? I don't know about him. My first tournament match was 1964 The first time I coached from the bench was 1968. I have been doing both ever since. go figure!! Your remarks on the other hand are just empty theorising. Be humble for once and learn from the honest good sense of posters like APW46, Jkillashark, Baal, wturber, to name a few and even myself. You might be able to give an interesting talk on the technique of giving the illusion of experience while having little, but in the area of tt coaching and tactics, all of us who have done it, know that you haven't had any experience worth speaking of.

 PPP.  It doesn't matter.  You see, AgentHEX has seemingly magical powers.  His intellect is so strong, it can be used like The Force in Star Wars.  All he has to do is tell somone how to do something, and instantly they would have the motor skills to execute it perfectly ----and he wouldn't need 60 seconds either.   That would be like an eternity to him.  For him, theory and practice are the same thing.  And it's not just ping pong.  He can tell you about how things work in places he has never seen, and I am pretty sure he would have good advice (with lots of big words) for particle physicists, heart surgeons, philosophers, playwrights, chefs and plumbers.  He is The Most Interesting Man in the World.  When he drinks beer, he drinks Dos Equis.     

Capt Honey CheeseHead Badger is a legend in his own mind. All I can say is that I actually played Table Tennis.

Baal wrote: pingpongpaddy wrote: AgentHEX wrote: Would you say you have more of this "experience" than jt99sf or less? I don't know about him. My first tournament match was 1964 The first time I coached from the bench was 1968. I have been doing both ever since. go figure!! Your remarks on the other hand are just empty theorising. Be humble for once and learn from the honest good sense of posters like APW46, Jkillashark, Baal, wturber, to name a few and even myself. You might be able to give an interesting talk on the technique of giving the illusion of experience while having little, but in the area of tt coaching and tactics, all of us who have done it, know that you haven't had any experience worth speaking of.  PPP.  It doesn't matter.  You see, AgentHEX has seemingly magical powers.  His intellect is so strong, it can be used like The Force in Star Wars.  All he has to do is tell somone how to do something, and instantly they would have the motor skills to execute it perfectly ----and he wouldn't need 60 seconds either.   That would be like an eternity to him.  For him, theory and practice are the same thing.  And it's not just ping pong.  He can tell you about how things work in places he has never seen, and I am pretty sure he would have good advice (with lots of big words) for particle physicists, heart surgeons, philosophers, playwrights, chefs and plumbers.  He is The Most Interesting Man in the World.  When he drinks beer, he drinks Dos Equis.

To this point, Baal claims experience teaching supposedly sophisticated material to smart people, but it obviously hasn't helped much with grasping what teaching is. That's rather more disturbing than if it were the case otherwise.

I haven't bragged. I just told you the brief facts because you asked about my experience.
I am happy with my results, both as a player and a coach, but as I dont feel that comfortable talking about myself, I wont go into detail here.

As for you, I dont need to say any more, your posts speak of your lack of experience of tt coaching and tactics more eloquently than I can. One thing puzzles me:- You personally believe in doing things well- so why are you still writing such guff?
goodbye

Spot on.
I am just amazed that he is not embarrassed to write such stuff

Baal wrote: AgentHEX wrote: To this point, Baal claims experience teaching supposedly sophisticated material to smart people, but it obviously hasn't helped much with grasping what teaching is. That's rather more disturbing than if it were the case otherwise. The question asked by the OP is what you tell someone during a 60 second timeout.  It's a good question.  People who have had a lot of experience with giving and receiving coaching in this situation made a number of good suggestions that are going to be useful most of the time. The key thing about a timeout is players are nervous and the very fact they are calling a timeout means things are not going according to plan---and you have 60 seconds.  Not much like a math class.    But then AgentHEX enters the thread and the familiar pattern returns.  He states that nobody knows what they are talking about, everything and everybody is wrong, he says we have "terrible misconceptions" in this thread --- and as with the 'play with a clipboard' thread and his instance that one size fits all in the 'easiest way to get better' thread, and how good people can be playing left-handed in another thread, and on and on---well he sort of paints himself into a corner, sometimes staking out a fairly unusual position.  In response to people who question the position, he lashes out and goes on about teaching science and math, pretty much no matter what the thread is.  He does that a lot.  Most of the time it is incoherent, but no matter that.  He ends up as usual hijacking the thread and making noise just for the sake of it. Somehow he thinks that his remark quoted above has something to do with what you tell someone in a 60-second timeout.    Let me ask some of the other members.  Does my description fairly well describe AgentHEX' modus operandi?

APW46 wrote: AgentHEX wrote: Personally I believe in doing things well. So when people brag about their abundant experience at doing things less than well it's simply not applicable because doing poorly a lot doesn't translate to well unless maybe as an example of what not to do. In this case, it's pretty easy to see that folks who have terrible misconceptions about how coaching or teaching works don't have experience of much value, to me at least. That's because while it's possible this turned out OK for them by accident in some cases, it's usually a bad sign when someone doesn't learn from the experiences when it necessarily doesn't. In practice I would argue that people who have to defer to their own authority instead of actually teaching, especially when it comes to something like teaching, shouldn't be in this business in the first place.  can you expand ?

There are two points here. One is that experience is hardly created equal any more than value of opinions. Experience in itself only means that someone has spent a lot time doing something, and says nothing about the quality of results. For example, many players spend numerous years trying to climb only to improve very slowly or stuck at quite mediocre levels. These hardly seem the best people to take advice from on how to improve, and if anything should serve as what not to do; quite contrary to what the comedic argument of "experience" claims.

The second point is that teaching is a discipline to be demonstrated rather than claimed. It's important to have a strong rational basis built on understanding what's to be taught. You see this in just about any decent self-respecting instruction manual. OTOH, the kind of people who dismiss these basics of education out of hand and instead demand students just trust in them because they're some sort of authority figure are exactly the charlatans to avoid. There's a very high intersection between this set and the one in the paragraph above.

Baal wrote: Tinykin is of course correct, as usual.  You actually have quite a bit less than 60 sec. A few things about Brad Gilbert, author of "Winning Ugly".  Agent HEX rejects the concept of "winning ugly", as per his comment above.  It is not obvious if he ever read the book, but I mentioned it, so he rejects it. According to Wikipedia, Gilbert was the coach of Andre Agassi for eight years, from March 1994 until January 2002. Agassi won six of his eight majors when Gilbert was his coach. Agassi described Gilbert as "the greatest coach of all time".  On June 3, 2003, Gilbert became the coach of Andy Roddick, who won the 2003 US Open under Gilbert's guidance, as well as clinching the year-end world no. 1 for 2003 and reaching the 2004 Wimbledon final. They parted ways on December 12, 2004.  On July 26, 2006, Gilbert was announced as taking over the coaching duties of Scottish player Andy Murray. On November 14, 2007, after 16 months working together, Gilbert and Murray parted company. By then, Murray had reached a career-high ranking of no. 8. Of course tennis differs from TT in that there is no coaching during a match.

I reject the concept of winning ugly for players still developing their basic skills the same as I reject for example teaching to the test in instances where learning the subject material matters.

I would have expected that someone who claims to be a prof would grasp this rather trivial claim, but alas my hopes remain shattered.

AgentHex wrote: The second point is that teaching is a discipline to be demonstrated rather than claimed. It's important to have a strong rational basis built on understanding what's to be taught. You see this in just about any decent self-respecting instruction manual. OTOH, the kind of people who dismiss these basics of education out of hand and instead demand students just trust in them because they're some sort of authority figure are exactly the charlatans to avoid. There's a very high intersection between this set and the one in the paragraph above.

I think this presumes quite strongly that the person with a greater rational understanding of a subject makes a better teacher than someone with more practical experience teaching or practicing the subject successfully. For many reasons, this is not always true. There is a lot of knowledge that is inherently practical and is hard to rationally state or codify. It's one of the reasons why people who sound smarter aren't always right.   Rational discourse is not a serious substitute for practical experience in something like table tennis where results ultimately determine who is the winner, not how well one argues the theory of the sport.

Many of the people you are arguing with (myself clearly excluded) have played this sport at one time or another at a 2200+ level. They have also worked with people who tried to learn this sport later in life and are sharing their experiences. To dismiss them, you have to do a bit more than philosophize about the structure of knowledge and education, all of which have little to do with whether you are right about the specific matter being discussed. Moreover, being right or wrong about these points is hardly settled by any kind of argument. The kinds of experiments required to ultimately settle them are complicated so we are all left to examine plausibility with our own rational and experiential limitations.

To cut a long story short, claiming to have played at a high level, coaching players who have played at a high level or coaching players who have faced the situations under discussion is the price of admission. Even if you decide not to discuss your credentials, most of us know enough to know that if you haven't done these things, all the rational arguments in the world will not buy you credibility because that in the real world ultimately comes with success, not rationality. It's like the professor who argued that NFL teams should go for it more often on 4th down. He may have been right, but his arguments didn't convince anyone because there were practical limitations he didn't consider and he wasn't the one going to bear the costs of failure.

First of all, before you even attempt to coach someone in a match situation, you must ask yourself, how well do you know their game? A lof of "good coaches" tries to coach players to play like they would have done themself.

If you feel confident that you know the players game, then less is more. Don't throw out a bunch of advices, cause the player will most likely not be able to take it in. Technical flaws wont be corrected during a match, they are rather something to work on on the next training session, in a match, you got to work with the tools you have.

I usually try to find one way that the player wins points and one way that costs him points, advicing him to seek out the former pattern and advice on how to avoid the later. Mostly basic stuff. Never introduce new stuff.

Im known to be a good match coach, at my level, but I know I wouldnt be much help to a higher level player. Ive had the pleasure of sitting next to a high level coach and the small things he noticed was amazing to see and to experience how his seemingly simple advices turned the game around completely.

NextLevel wrote: AgentHex, If the understanding of the people you are debating with was as poor as you make out, why are they so successful?

Are they?

Isn't success the first prerequisite for merit? The point is not that merit makes you right. It is that it is hard to distinguish it in practical matters from "this is my title/success". Table tennis is not physics where one can look at a paper and determine that it is Nobel prize worthy given its implications for research, even if the writer has no prior experience in physics. It is a sport where a lot of knowledge about is acquired by actually playing it successfully. Arguments will never establish that a person has done that.

Is there something about the previous post that's hard to understand?

What's hard for me to understand is what I've been re-interating is basically true for just about any sort of competitive endeavor. In fact, I'm straining to think of anything, sports or otherwise for which all the above + the other thread isn't rather obvious. IOW, in order for someone to deny any of this they literally must have very limited understanding of anything competitive, yet still act incredulous as if this isn't embarrassing for anyone claiming "experience".


Edited by AgentHEX - 09/29/2013 at 7:58am

AgentHEX is a troll.  Please don't feed the troll.