Stellan and Angie once again graced the Alameda club with a recent two day mini-camp, March 19-20.  The camp sold out fairly quickly but as usual I was one of the first to sign up so no worries there.

Overall I feel like I did much better at this camp than the previous two.  I think this was mainly because I had been through the drills twice before and knew what to expect.  I'm also in better shape than in recent years due to the (small) amount of running I've been doing the past nine months.

Stellan and Angie were as usual very positive and supportive of all the players regardless of level.  Angie left me with two pieces of useful advice.  The first is that I tend to drop my racket between shots which makes blocking difficult.  Keep your racket up between points as it's easy to drop it if you need to loop but more difficult (i.e., slower) to raise it if you need to block.  The second is that the cure for my difficulty in moving left to play elbow balls with my forehand is to (don't hold your breath) do more drills in which I move to my left on elbow balls.  E.g., Falkenberg and it's variations.  This one in particular kind of smacked me in the head like a well aimed brick: of course I need to practice it if I want to get better at it!  Just a little embarrassing that I needed to be told that.

Stellan also pointed out to me that I'm not snapping my wrist hard enough on service.  I thought I was but when I went to practice it consciously I notice that on the backswing I wasn't really cocking the racket back very far so the total travel wasn't nearly the 180 degrees that it could be with the Waldner style service grip.  So I've been trying to work that into practice and matches since the camp with the result being that my serve has gone from being mediocre to really crappy.  Temporarily I hope.  It's funny watching the whole thing fall apart when you change one little aspect of your service motion.

The tryouts continue.  Hurricane 2, not tuned, "provincial" version.  In four words: heavy, slow, ultra tacky.  When I first put it on I could pick up a ball off the table and hold it stuck to the rubber indefinitely.  Surprisingly low throw, really quite difficult to adjust to.  Sadly my sheet appears to have been defective as the top sheet started to come off the sponge after only a few hours use.  By the end of tonight's Alameda club round robin I had several large bubbly detached spots in the center of the rubber.  Overall not for me.

I'm trying a red sheet, I think the package said 38 degrees, thickness is 2.1 or 2.15.  This is the factory tuned version so it came with a thick layer of glue attached to the sponge: just put a layer of glue on your blade and apply.

I can see why people like this rubber.  Fantastic for brush looping, very firm sponge, very heavy, surface is tackier than either the 729 or Palio.  You can really get that Chinese power drive/loop stroke going.  Throw seems to be quite high.  Speed is very good so far but that will surely change as the tuner wears off.  Unfortunately  it is very heavy and makes my allround blade, which under normal circumstances is fairly flexible, feel like a wet noodle.  Of course the weight of rubber sheets varies and sometimes you just get a heavy one.

Blocking, serving, and touch shots are all fabulous, as well as brush loop drives as mentioned above.  Really a very nice rubber with a lot of gears.  If it was a tad lighter with a lower throw then I might invest in more.

[3/27.  I removed the rubber today to try another one and weighed it.  The glue layer that came attached to the sponge was 6 grams by itself!  The rubber was 48g after it was removed (cut to my blade's shape).  The rubber was stuck on very, very firmly and I had to peel it off very slowly to prevent splinters from coming off with it.]

I've been trying the red version in whatever thickness it comes in (2.1? something like that).  Same medium tackiness as the 729 (will pick up a ball for a split second) and the sponge felt to be equally hard, i.e., very firm but not rock like.  Much faster than the 729 but despite the firm sponge the overall feeling is pretty soft.  Clicks slightly on hard loops but is pretty quiet otherwise.  Reminds me a little bit of Avalox Pronte, which I haven't used in years.  The soft feeling made brush looping more difficult which I didn't like.  Blocking is extremely easy and serving and short game are all good, same as the 729.

Overall a step up from the transcend SP.  (That rubber was out before the glue ban and my guess is that it was intended to be used with speed glue.)  However I didn't like the soft feel, I don't think it's right for the stroke I'm trying to develop.  It feels more like a firm Japanese or European rubber (albeit with a tacky topsheet) than a Chinese one.

I've had a couple of sessions with it on the forehand (express x-plode on the bh at the moment) and all I can say is: I'm totally exhausted.  Wiped out, sore, spent, dead, done.  My God I have to swing hard with this stuff on the forehand.  With these unglued/tuned Chinese rubbers all the power comes from your body, you have to move and be in position to transfer your weight or there's nothing on the ball, you might as well blow a soap bubble over the net in that case.

Slowness, like speed, of course is a double edged sword and the other edge is that you have so much more time to recover.  Tonight at the Alameda club RR I was on a tough table and won two out of four matches.  There were many good rallies where I was able to loop two and sometimes three balls in a row, something unheard of with my older, faster fh rubber.  Thanks to the deadness of the sponge I didn't have as much trouble returning serve on the fh side as I thought I would though I did net a number of forehand pushes out of unfamiliarity with the rubber.  Rather comically I left about half a dozen drop shots in the bottom of the net because I was expecting the ball to pop up a bit more.

I don't think I have the proper stroke yet on the fh for this type of rubber.  With Chinese rubbers you have to rip right through and over the top of the ball, the motion is larger and the follow through is bigger.  You have to accelerate the racket earlier and get it up to maximum velocity at impact.  I was able to readjust from my previous stroke, which was more compact, some of the time but overall I think my technique success rate was around 25% on the night.  I did really enjoy the brush looping feeling when I got it right though.  One thing I don't like is that the rubber doesn't really make any sound on contact with the ball.  I remember H3 making a nice cracking sound on hard loops which I liked.  This stuff is very quiet all the time, even on very high speed loops.  Hardly rewarding after all that work!  But I did enjoy the massive amounts of spin I could generate when I got the stroke right.

So 729 SP Transcend red: slow, medium tackiness, sponge is hard and heavy.  Brush looping, blocking, serving, pushing all good.  Had trouble counterlooping with it as the bat angle had to be very closed to prevent the ball from going long (this was in warm up as I rarely counterloop in matches).  No problems looping against side and underspin though.

On other fronts the backhand opening was looking good tonight, I hit a lot of very good opening loops and was even able to back them up sometimes with a loop after the block.  I'll keep the transcend SP on the fh side for a little while longer because I want to get used to the tackiness and weight before I start evaluating other rubbers.  So far there's a sheet of palio hadou biotech and one haifu blue whale II waiting in the wings.