Stilltt wrote:on October 27 2023 at 10:12pm
Anyway since we have hardbat we are good re. simplifying for a wider audience and no need for a change. We just learn from pickleball's success: "keep it fun and simple, they will come."
Promoting hardbat more enthusiastically seems one of the ways to surf that same wave.
Stilltt does not understand the most unique trait & most distinguishing nature of table tennis as compared to other racket sports. Table tennis is first and foremost, a sport of complex & diverse spins. Yes it is also probably the fastest racket sport. And tabletennis is for better or worse the most complicated sport due to the complex spins at highest speeds. Would slowing the speed down a little bit help ? Yes it would but the robotNazis would never agree to reducing the maximum sponge thickness from 2.5 mm down to 1.7 mm.
Still the spins are what keep tabletennis players addicted to the sport. Majority of players want top spin and some also back spin and the speed based flat hitters are almost extinct. Spin is like an addictive drug and that is what players crave for.
Pickleball on the other hand has deliberately removed the spin from table tennis & tennis by designing rackets to give the least spin by design. This is OK if that is what lots of players who do not enjoy creating or solving the complex spin of table tennis by moving on to tabletennis.
Also therefore it is incredibly stupid to try to divert children to hardbat & sandpaper , like USATT is doing by running hardbat & sandpaper events for youth. The hardbat strokes are very different from strokes with spinverted rubbers & this will only confuse children if they try to switch between hardbat & spinverted. Yes talented players can switch back & forth but probably less than 10% or even 25% at best.
It is not a problem if players over 60 have their own hardbat event but even that I am not sure because it has been more than 70 years since sponge arrived & it is time to move on. Even new players over 40 coming to tabletennis should not use hardbat or sandpaper even if they cannot loop due to physical limitations or if they never learned to loop properly from their youth. These older players still should be using only OX long pips on their weakside (usually backhand) & short pips with sponge on their strong side (usually forehand).
You also miss another important point. Most humans usually have a stronger and or different weakside (usually backhand) compared to their strong side (usually forehand) in not just tabletennis but in any racket sport. So for most, tabletennis is aforehand dominant sport. Hardbat & sandpaper does not accommodate for this difference between forehand & backhand like sponge domain rubbers do. Sponge domain rubbers help enhance this different playing styles of forehand & backhand much much better than hardbat or sandpaper. For example most players cannot loop (I mean really loop) on their backhand (though they all delude themselves they can & use spinverted rubbers). Most of these players can probably block better or chop better or flat hit better on their backhand & sponge domain makes specialized rubbers available for this purpose