Staring at the ball and pace control

Is there any post here talking about staring ball for return and pace control?  Many coaches ask their students to slow it down, but do not specifically mention how. To me, I feel staring at the ball is the way to slow the pace and reduce errors in return.

 

On serve receive, there is a little more time obviously, but not enough to stare. Watching the ball flight is one way to read the spin, but one cannot make a university study of the ball, just won't work.

 

Maybe we should use another word.

Here is the link to my original post.

There was also a breakdown of what you should be giving your attention to, by Wturber on the OOAK forums. It's pretty long but I will paste it below.

There is a vid discussing TB's visual acuity(German language).

My current operating principle is that you can maintain central focus on the ball and the peripheral picks up the opponents movements giving you information with regard to what they are going to do and where they are when you are hitting the ball. All the high speed vid that I've seen show players tracking the ball into the area of contact with the ball but not entirely certain whether or not they are tracking the out going shot. The postulate is that they shift focus to the other player or part of the player such as the arm or paddle. Then re-acquire the ball and track it into the contact area. There is no direct evidence to support this hypothesis from eye tracking studies. 

Here is another vid by a manufacturer of eye tracking system that would seem to indicate that the ball is tracked to and from the opposing player.

Here is another one with some casual hitters.

Tracking study from 2002 journal of sports sciences. Just google and download the pdf if you want to read the whole thing.

Abstract-

The aim of this study was to determine the role of head, eye and arm movements during the execution of a table tennis forehand stroke. Three-dimensional kinematic analysis of line-of-gaze, arm and ball was used to describe visual and motor behaviour. Skilled and less skilled participants returned the ball to cued right or left target areas under three levels of temporal constraint: pre-, early- and late-cue conditions. In the pre- and early-cue conditions, both high and low skill participants tracked the ball early in flight and kept gaze stable on a location in advance of the ball before ball-bat contact. Skilled participants demonstrated an earlier onset of ball tracking and recorded higher performance accuracy than less skilled counterparts. The manipulation of cue condition showed the limits of adaptation to maintain accuracy on the target. Participants were able to accommodate the constraints imposed by the early-cue condition by using a shorter quiet eye duration, earlier quiet eye offset and reduced arm velocity at contact. In the late-cue condition, modifications to gaze, head and arm movements were not sufficient to preserve accuracy. The findings highlight the functional coupling between perception and action during time-constrained, goal-directed actions.

wturber's post content-