TT Travels in Texas

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   After leaving the Austin area I moved on to Canyon Lake just north of San Antonio for 2 weeks and am now spending 1 week in Waco.
I did not get to play as much in San Antonio as I originally planned.  The drive to the club was over an hour long and campround gates were locked at 9pm.  This limited my time at the club and made making the long drive less desirable.  I did get to participate in 2 sessions of the US Para Olympic Development Team training camp that was being held in San Antonio.  They needed a few extra practice partners for early sessions so I filled in.  Yes, my footwork and movement are atrocious but I do not qualify for any para class so I was just trying to help out.

The coach, Vlad, asked that I not use my LP in the specific drills we did those 2 sessions.  So I got to play my Bh with inverted quite a bit.  Good practice for me since I hope to eventually do more twiddling.  Turns out I have a really good inverted Bh.  Who knew. Looks like I may have to switch and just use the LP on the Fh.  Ok that last part is just a joke, but I was surprised how well I did play the inverted Bh.

I have played 3 days so far in Waco and hope to get in 3 more days.  It is a small club with 6 tables but limited court area and low ceillings.  I guess I am the strongest player there (no single loses yet), but several players are really close and I have had close matches.  I am slowly realizing that I am most likely trying to do too much with the LP on serve returns.  Simple blocks of topspin and punches against underspin seem to be strong enough to keep from being attacked beyond my ability to return.  And I miss a lot less than when trying to do extreme chop blocks or outright kills.  It may be different when facing 2000 level players but for now I am going to focus more on getting good with the simply techniques.  Still fighting the tendency to open the blade angle when trying to create more underspin against topspin.  Everytime I do it I just dump the ball into the net due to lack of forward power.

The other thing I am finding difficult is judging how much forward motion to put into my blocks against topspin.  On very fast loops where I need to pull back slightly or just not go forward at all I do ok.  But when I get slower topspin where I need to add a little forward momentum to the return I have problems.  I dump lots into the net and then when I try to add more I hit long.  Much different than blocking with inverted were you can use racket angle to generate more topspin on the block to deal with fast balls or block flat against slower balls and let the incoming topspin help throw the ball up and over the net.   It is a lot of fun trying to learn new stuff.

Next Friday I head up to the Dallas/Ft Worth area.  Should find many good players to anhilate me.

Mark - Who warns all TT clubs to keep their doors locked unless they want a mjamja infestation.