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Last year I was taking lessons with two coaches: Au Di at lincoln square in Oakland and Silang (Steve) Wang down in north San Jose.  Unfortunately Lincoln Square has moved its table tennis program to mornings so that Au Di and I won't be able to continue our lessons.  In addition I've temporarily stopped going to ICC since I wasn't able to commit to playing in the league every week while preparing to move from SF over to Berkeley.  Hence the lessons with Steve also had to be dropped. 

But now the move is over and things are settling down a bit and thankfully I'm able to play more tt.  Since moving to Berkeley I've been playing more at the Alameda TTC (site of last summer's Stellangie camp) and lately I've hooked up with coach Xin there for some lessons.  I'm not sure what Xin's background is but what I can tell from the first two lessons are that: a) he knows what he's doing and b) he's coached and/or played at a pretty high level in China.  The drills we do are mostly multiball and he pretty much has only one speed: inhumanly fast.  He feeds multiball better than anyone I've ever met.  For instance we do one drill where I'm supposed to use my fh on every shot and he feeds random balls to my fh side.  Short, long, chop, topspin, everything and the kitchen sink comes at you.  And he's good at it: one ball will be heavy deep chop that you need to step back and loop and the next,  one second later, will be a short no spin just over the net that you have to get in and flip or push.  And the next second it's something else.  It's uncanny how he can switch gears like that, and he's fast and rarely misses.

We did another drill where he feeds me a heavy chop to my backhand side which I step around and loop with the fh, then he fires a series of smashes down the fh line which I'm supposed to get over to and counter back.  It's intended to simulate the match situation where the "opening loop" is smashed back.  As soon as that loop hits the table you have to be ready to counter the next ball on the opposite side of the table because he hits it hard and fast down the line and follows it up with 3 or 4 more just like it in rapid fire succession.

Needless to say the lessons are intense and at a much faster pace than what I'm used to.  At first I couldn't even recover from the loop and get to the smash in time: it just flew by my outstretched racket.  At the end of the lesson I was just about recovering fast enough to get over there but I would usually miss the table with the counter (and the next several after that).

Naturally Xin has his own ideas about what constitutes a good stroke and that can be summed up by "keep it short and use a lot of wrist".  This is true even on the forehand where he wants you to use mostly wrist and forearm.  In fact he insists that your forehand should be as wristy as your backhand.  At those speeds you don't have time to waste and he often tells me my strokes are too long, especially the follow through.  Of course this is something I learned from Au Di, who liked a nice long follow through most of the time (but not always).  Interestingly enough, like Steve, he noticed early on that my backhand is better than my forehand, which again is Au Di's influence.  

Overall in the first two lessons we did a lot of things that were difficult for me and made me feel uncomfortable, awkward, slow, uncoordinated, and at times totally incompetent.  It was frustrating and maybe even a little demoralizing.  Naturally going back for more this weekend.