Hitting the Wall

So this is how my personal TT story goes: I used to play around on the weekends at my local Chinese school in middle school. I dropped TT in high school for basketball, and now I'm taking TT back up as a freshman in college for my school team. When I first got to our school club, I was more or less a total novice again, I could only block, couldn't use spin at all, much less return it. Well, needless to say, I was motivated to really improve and I'm really into the game now. I managed to practice plenty over the first semester and winter break, so I'm certainly much improved from the beginning of this year. However, I'm kind of in a rut now because of that improvement. Our school club is divided more or less into two teams that compete, team 1 and 2 (1 being the better team that actually counts to the school record). In that one semester and winter break I've managed to overcome everyone on team 2, and now I find I really get little out of playing them. However, I don't really get the chance to play team 1 people because they prefer to play each other, understandably of course. Basically, I've landed right in between the two teams now, and I still want to get better to make it onto team 1, but I feel like because of the limitations of being able to play better people all the time, my progress is definitely slowing down. So have you guys ever hit a wall in your progress? And if so, how did you handle it? How'd you manage to get over it and keep progressing? 

Glad to hear I'm not alone on this, I understand getting better at things becomes progressively harder the better you are, unfortunately a big ol' catch 22. It's just frustrating being out of place I guess. I find myself losing concentration when I play scrimmage matches with lower players and getting away with it, which isn't what I want. 

I'm thinking of getting a coach during the summer, there's not really any nearby clubs that I could get to during the school year, since I'm a full time student.  If the team 1 people were available for help and practice I probably wouldn't be in this situation. I can't blame them, they have more riding on their practicing since their goals are to reach college nationals. 

Some thoughts on getting better practice with the Team 2 players.

mjamja wrote: Some thoughts on getting better practice with the Team 2 players.   1. Most players play some part of their game at a higher level than there overall game.   Try to figure out what each of the other Team 2 players does best and then try to get practice against that thing when playing that player.   If playing games then play to that players strength and don't exploit his weakness.   If doing practice drills, try to do drills using that players strength.   2. Do one-sided practice drills.  Most of us tend to do drills where each player is working equally on their game. This keeps us both interested.  However if the levels of play are different then it is hard to work equally.  Let each person pick a drill (or stroke they want to work on).  It is their drill and the other person works like a coach not really trying to work on their own game, but rather help the other guy.  With weaker players you might want them to feed more multi-ball to you or just hit one shot at you rather than playing out points.  For example instead of looping to their block work on hitting a winning loop away from them and have them quickly start another rally.    3. Do more footwork drills or try out better (more difficult footwork in matches).  The quality of the shot coming at you is not as important if what you are really working on is your basic footwork.    4. Work on something you really do badly or are just starting to learn when playing matches with weaker players.  I really only block loops now, but am trying to learn counterlooping.   In some matches with weaker players I set them up to loop and then force myself to try counters instead of blocks on their loops.  This does mean I sometimes lose practice matches to players I probably could beat, but it is worth it to get better quality practice.   5. Do not win points with serves when playing weaker players.  You can practice more difficult serves by yourself later.  Hit good quality, but less tricky or less heavily spinning serves.  These serves can actually be useful as a change of pace from your best serves when playing a match that really counts.  If you are not winning with your serve you have to work harder on being good at the rest of the game so you get better practice from the weaker player.   Hope some of this makes sense and is useful to you.   Mark

Thanks for the input Mark, I'll certainly try to make use of some of this. I especially like the serve idea for scrimmage matches.

Great suggestions!