Well I have decided to start a blog about my latest and craziest passion: Table tennis. While I would not normally prefer to call this site “ping pong” because that is not the appropriate name for the game here in America, it became quite clear that ping pong is far more popular here than table tennis. So I caved in and decided to call my site ping pong resource.
My goal with this website is to have some informative articles and helpful hints for those who are starting out playing table tennis and would like more information such that they can go beyond the basement game of tapping the ball back and forth to each other over the net.
I’m also going to have a blog on here so that I can keep a running log of all the different things that I am trying and all of the different experiences that I’m having over the course of my table tennis career.
To whit: Over the last few weeks I have gone to play in a couple of different clubs in the Denver area. Even though I live up in the mountains of Colorado I have been able to make a couple of trips down to the “big city” over the last few weeks and have gotten a chance to play a couple different clubs.
The first one that I played at was in Lakewood. It is called The Pied Piper’s House of Pong (http://www.piedpipershouseofpong.com/) and is run by a great guy named Tom who has leased out some unused office space in a strip mall and has eight tables shoehorned into an area that doesn’t look like it should be big enough to play. But it certainly is and I had no trouble playing with players of all different levels.
This was my first experience playing in a club in quite a few years so I was a little bit anxious about playing and almost backed out of a couple of times while I was down in Denver that day waiting to play. However, everyone was extremely friendly, regardless of their level and I felt welcome and played a number of different players of all levels.
While certainly not a huge club — a good night for them has 12 to 15 players show up — it is very friendly feeling and has almost that “family” atmosphere. Which is not to say that there isn’t competitive play going on, there certainly is. There were players there are all the way from beginner up to probably close to 2000 level so you can get a game that will challenge you no matter what your skill is.
Then this past week I went to a different club. The Aurora Table Tennis Club (http://www.aurorattc.org/) is probably the largest club in Colorado. On a good day more than 30 or 40 people can show up to play here.
The club plays in a recreation center gymnasium which they divide up into 13 spaces to play with a very good tournament quality table and net set in each barrier-enclosed space. The lighting is decent and the temperatures are comfortable and you can get any level of competition you want here as well — though because of the size and quality of the club the better players tend to show up here so you had better be ready!
I ended up meeting a wonderful Korean woman there who had played when she was younger and had apparently achieved a little bit of success while she played, but was very rusty because she hadn’t played very much in the last 25 years. So we spent most of the afternoon working with each other. She shaking off her rust and me attempting to solidify my forehand and backhand strokes. We were pretty good for each other and found it unfortunate that I am not able to make it down there more often than I would like.
This is obviously a much larger club with much better competition, so the family feel is not there. However, there were folks who brought their kids in and played with them anyway so it is possible to have some family fun while you are there if you want to make the time with your family to do that.
During their five hour-long Sunday open session each week there are two coaches there who offer half-hour slots for coaching. You simply need to sign up on their sign up sheets for a half hour block of their time and then pay whatever the requisite fee is. Unfortunately, by the time I went to check for the list to see what the particulars were, it was already too late and I was not even able to find out what the rates were for their coaching services. But I would imagine they are fairly reasonable because they were busy the whole day!
That’s about it for the club reports so far because I simply have not been able to get out to any other clubs yet. Over the coming months, who knows…
