Schlager posting at About.com

I am a serial TT forumer from the mid-nineties. I don't post a lot but I monitor most of them. The original TT discussion site was on Usenet (anyone remember it?). It was called Rec.sport.table tennis (RSTT). It was fantastic for a couple of years but was ruined by one troll who made it impossible for anyone to have a conversation.

Most people moved over to About.com around 98/99 with the first mod being Sean O’Neil. It was great as the original contributors really knew their TT stuff and I learned a lot. People like Larry Hodges, Sean, Coach Mcafee and a few members from China and East Europe. But it was very USA-centric and still is. Their non-TT threads can also be very interesting. A classic was in the hours after 9/11 someone asked why they could not have shot down the aircraft before the hit. Another poster, a former fighter pilot who used to fly that area, explained that there would not have been enough time for the permissions. It would be days before the media realised the same.

MYTT was very Canadian-centric when it started. In fact I was an early member and I notice that I never contributed for the first few years. (Ignore the 2009 in my info. I lost my original password and re-applied). Today MYTT has morphed into a very good site biased towards youth opinions but very international. I’d love to see MYTT get into more non-TT related topics as it would be good to hear politics etc from a younger international perspective.

 So what if the threads focus a lot on equipment. That’s because

1 Most of us don’t really train as such. We much prefer to sort out our strokes in friendly matches rather than pay for coaching sessions, assuming it’s available.

2 Judging by all the physicists/engineers on here, members simply love the equipment threads. And I now know the meaning of “ the coefficient of restitution would be constant over the range of all impact speeds.”

Each forum has it’s own culture.

About.com is very USA oriented

MYTT is very youthful and international and perhaps the most active and popular

OOAK is funny rubber biased

Table Tennis Talk is very English and veteran oriented

Table Tennis Daily is new and has attracted several pro and semi-pro players as members

 

These days, I look at MYTT first as there’s always something new.

roundrobin wrote: I don't disagree with you there Jay... But now that I have a kid, who despite the fact he's only 15 months old, I already know how difficult it is to educate one in this era of self-entitlement.  He already has a true mind of his own, and won't do 99% of the things I asked.  So I know exactly how I will feel if my son is getting a public flogging in a world-wide forum like About.com for his behavior.  My point is you really don't know if it was purely his parents' or coach's fault... Singling such young kid out with name and all, and ridicule them publicly is beyond appropriate.  Such posts should have been deleted immediately by mods, but they did not want to do anything until the whole world had the chance to throw in their 2-cents worth on "this kid's behavior" many weeks later.  I have a major issue with that, and because of it I will never advise any of my friends to join that forum.  As a TD myself at LATTA who deals with many 1st. generation Asian immigrant parents paying through their nose to train their kids in table tennis and also academically, I now not only see their pressure through their facial expressions when they drop off and pick up their kids, I can actually feel their pain.

I don't disagree with the removing the name of the kid idea.  In fact, in the latest thread of that type I think a few people did specifically request that be done.  I don't recall if it was, but I think it is a good idea.  I understand that parents have limited control over what their kids do.  But when a kid is out of control you simply remove the kid - take him out of the tournament and go home.  So I don't buy much into the notion that most of these situations are really out of the control of the parent.  Also, I've seen enough parents out of control at baseball games in the past to understand that the root of kid's behavior problems is all too often with the parenting.

But each case is unique and in the end, it is up to tournament directors, tournament referees, and tournament players to make sure that these things are dealt with and done so at the tournament.  It probably doesn't belong on forums.  And in the most recent case on about.com, if I were the parent, I'd have asked that the video showing my kid be removed from being online so as to make it more difficult for anyone to make an issue of my kid's behavior.  I have lot of online videos posted and my personal policy is to remove any video if someone in the video requests it.  Or at the least to remove the portion that they are in.  And if I had a kid and he or she played table tennis, I'd be advising my kid to come up with something different than "cho" to yell - something that has a clear meaning and that is unlikely to be interpreted by an opponent as meaning effectively "in your face!"

But when a kid is out of control you simply remove the kid - take him out of the tournament and go home.  So I don't buy much into the notion that most of these situations are really out of the control of the parent. 


I think you are over-simplifying the task of parenting, Jay... I know from many parents with table tennis kids if you do exactly that (removing the kid/s from the premises and go home, or scold them loudly in front of others), you will lose control of your kids perhaps forever.  They will retaliate like you won't believe.  Many kids today simply don't have the respect of authority like in the past, and as a parent nowadays you are always risking losing their respect irreparably... It's a bad advice, I am sorry to say...







Edited by roundrobin - 10/30/2011 at 2:18am

You can always create respect by iron fist - no matter what they say about liberal parenting. Man is a social animal in the end.

Edited by Imago - 10/30/2011 at 3:12am

Imago wrote: You an always create respect by iron fist - no matter what they say about liberal parenting. Man is a social animal in the end.

Well, there are some personalities where that may not work so easily.  And there are kids that simply may not be controllable through normal good parenting.   And maybe that was what RoundRobin was driving at. 

But most kids are not so strong-willed that basic boundary drawing won't work.  With the small number of very strong-willed kids, you need to be more artful in how you approach the making of boundaries. You may even need professional assistance in figuring out how to deal with certain kids. But again, that's not typical.

Part of the problem, IMO, was shown in RoundRobin's previous post where he mentioned parents dropping off and picking up their kids.  All too often, that's the problem.  The parent is more chauffeur than parent.  Yeah, I know.  Parenting is a tough and often thankless job.  But it's a job that the parent chose.  The families I know well where the kids are well behaved kids have parents who are almost uniformly (or maybe uniformly) intimately involved in their kids activities, not just dropping the kids off, but watching their games, involved with the teams, visiting the school and talking with teachers, sometimes assisting in the coaching and other organizational activities and so forth.  It's a ton of work.

Their dads were probably too rude. On the other hand, running away is better than fostering a 36-year old child.

roundrobin wrote: Part of the problem, IMO, was shown in RoundRobin's previous post where he mentioned parents dropping off and picking up their kids.  All too often, that's the problem.  Not every parents are willing to sit around while their kids have a group and then individual lesson for up to 4 hours.  The higher level ones usually also stay around to play each other in a informal round robin.

Yes.  Not all parents are willing to do what they should do.  And I don't think that staying for a full four hours is necessarily what a parent should do.  There is a middle ground between that and just dropping the kid off.   And for me ends this tangent about parenting and kids. 

Tinykin_2 wrote:   I've been to big cadet tournaments in France where the noise of the players and spectators( with horns and rattlers) was just unbelievable.

One of the points that I think came out in that thread was that the nature of the noise can matter quite a lot  For instance, a loud conversation adjacent to my table is much more distracting to me than rock music, flashing lights and drunk patrons at a bar.  A loud shout 15 feet away from some kid or vet as I'm beginning to make a shot is more distracting than a few hundred or thousand fans with horns and rattlers.

In the U.S. we simply don't have the player density to separate kids from adults very often.  But I agree that there are clear benefits in doing so and that different standards of behavior can reasonably develop for each.