#5 – Daniel Ives: TableTennisDaily in China (Part 1)

The Expert Table Tennis Podcast

Daniel Ives is the founder of TableTennisDaily, one of the most popular table tennis websites in the world. I actually used to play against him as a junior in tournaments and county matches (he would always win), so I’ve known Dan for some time.

In January 2015 he travelled to Beijing, China with STIGA to film a four-part documentary series called ‘STIGA Presents The Journey Through Chinese Table Tennis’, which you can watch here. I decided to get Dan on the show to talk about his experiences and share some of what he discovered about Chinese table tennis.

This is Part 1 (Part 2 will be released in a week) and covers Dan’s trips to a recreational table tennis club in Beijing, a table tennis school for 5-12 year olds and the Beijing provincial team.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• What a recreational table tennis club in China is actually like.
• All about the Chinese pyramid system and how it works.
• How the ping pong schools select and train their young players.
• Which drills and exercises they do.
• What happens if they are dropped or kicked out along the way.
• All about the discipline and strictness of the training environment.
• How the training fits around academic work.
• About the transition from school to provincial table tennis.
• What life is like as a Chinese provincial table tennis player.
• How Dan fared against the young Chinese players.
• The level of these young players compared to UK standards.

Links from this episode:

• TableTennisDaily
• STIGA Table Tennis
• STIGA Presents The Journey Through Chinese Table Tennis

Thanks for listening!

Thank you so much for joining us. I really hope you enjoyed the show.

As we are a fairly new podcast it would really help us out if you could go and leave us an honest review on iTunes. It’s very simple to do and will help us to get noticed in the crowded world of podcasting.

A big thank you to Dan for joining me on this episode. I hope you are looking forward to hearing Part 2 of our chat next week. It will be released, as usual, on Friday morning.

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