Excerpts of Life
The Thrills And Challenges Of Playing A Sport Without A Coach
it ain’t all frustrating
I play a lot of sports, and with that comes losing.
Having removed myself from my table tennis coach, I’ve been pursuing the sport on my own.
Spending hours studying how people play on youtube, or by watching the strokes of the more experienced players.
Yet, as much as I have advanced, there’s still a lingering sense of pain within me.
It’s the paradox of losing.
How I’m not willing to seek experience from the experienced, and instead want to embark on the journey myself.
They say the journey is more important than the destination. The things you learn along the way, the people that you meet, the struggles that thwart you along the way — it’s all part and parcel of life.
Removing my attachment from a coach and playing at a local ping pong club, I’m still uncertain on whether that’s been the right decision for me.
Every time I lose, I like to think that I’ve learnt something from the experience. After all, aren’t champions the ones that get up after they fall the hardest?
Instead, feelings of hate and incompetence rise up within me, instead of the supposed feelings that I have tried my best, learning all on my own.
Why Table Tennis (or any sport really) is hard to learn alone
Table Tennis is a sport filled with minute technical adjustments, learnt over years of specific training to remove bad habits.
And when those changes happen, the player often improves by a long way.
To claim to do that myself, through pure experimentation — without much experience in ping pong, sounds like quite a mighty feat.
But we live in the era of abundant information, where table tennis shots are practised over a million times online. Plus, I have a whole plethora of players I can reference in my table tennis club. Heck, I might as well sit there for an hour looking at the small, yet unique nuances of professionals, and what differentiates them.
As much as that feeling of experimentation thrills me, there’s still this nagging thought within me that I’m doing it all wrong. That I’ll build the incorrect muscle memory. And it’s never fun to lose — realizing that all your experimentation has gone wrong.
Let’s try to think on the bright side. See the silver lining in things.
I’m supposed to celebrate the fact that I won against a player who trains every single week. Yet it’s so difficult to do so.
I like to think that winning is a combination of luck, resources, experience, hard work and time spent. Often, when I lose, I fail to see that perhaps my opponent has bested me today, but perhaps I shall best him tomorrow.
Perhaps he was lucky that I couldn’t counter his spin today.
Or that he’d found the perfect resource online, the perfect tip that helped him dominate me today.
Understanding that from every experience, I try to take away something. Whatever that is. Just something. Something that just makes me feel a little better. That the lost was meaningful.
My learning may have been incorrect. It may be completely wrong.
But I’ve begun to realize that that is the beauty of experimentation. The fun is to get things wrong. To learn and grow my experience.
You either win or you learn right?
It’s all so thrilling
Perhaps I won’t attach myself to a coach anytime soon. I’d rather leave it all up to the experimentation, and find joy in the fact that I get to discover this amazing sport on my own. Not having anyone criticise my every movement as I make it.
While my friends soar ahead in their coaching, I’m going to self-myelinate.
I’ve managed to draw/defeat them occasionally without a coach. Without spending a dime.
Money does buy you time. Time saved from experimenting and thinking about new techniques.
But thinking itself gives you experience. Nothing is spoonfed to me.
And I think I’ve come to terms with that.
Will I build some bad habits? Sure.
But will I enjoy the learning process? Maybe.
I’ll cry, I’ll be stressed, I’ll be mad when I lose.
But that’s okay.
Because when I win, I’ll know that I’ve done it myself.
Onward I go.
Here’s to striving for a better us every day.
I guess that’s the spirit we should all adopt.
