Australia’s number 1 player William Henzell has spent the last year in Austria at the Werner Schlager Academy in preparation for the London 2012 Olympics. With less than 100 days to go until the opening ceremony, William would love to head back over to Europe where he can get the best training and competition.

To help him achieve this William is seeking sponsorship. He has already been on ABC TV and has more interviews lined up with channel 9 news, fox sports news, and ABC. Through these interviews he can offer good exposure on TV, radio and newspaper.

If you want to find out more about William Henzell then you can watch the ABC interview. He is a 9 time Australian Singles Champion and this will be his third Olympic Games.

If you’re interested in sponsoring Henzell then contact me.

While Alois has been busy answering your questions, I’ve been busy rebuilding the PingSkills website and it’s nearly ready to be released. So what changes can you expect?

The DVDs are moving into the lessons page

Personally I think that the lessons, DVDs and Ask the Coach section are the main features of the site. Currently there are too many navigation items at the top of the page and these can get lost. The other problem is that people are unsure of whether they should get the DVDs, stick with the free lessons or go for our premium membership.

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It sure is nice to be appreciated. Mcrey Banderlipe II was kind enough to make up this sign for PingSkills. He also sent this message:

Thank you Jeff, Alois, and Pingskills.com. Table Tennis is really a fun and life-changing sport.

We’d have to say that we agree. Thanks so much Mcrey for making up the sign. It really was a nice surprise to see it!

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Australia has a problem with the lack of female athletes playing Table Tennis. You may recall in one of our earliest PingPod’s we spoke with Ashleigh Stevenson about this issue.

Well now there’s some good news. England’s Steve Rowe has devised a quite unique solution. It’s called Aerobic Table Tennis.

“I was trying to think of ways to get more females involved in table tennis, so I looked at what females like to do for exercise in general”, said Steve Rowe. “I researched and found out that women like Aerobics and Yoga; I took the idea of Aerobic Table Tennis to our local sports development in Wigan UK, Wigan Sports Development and they have made Aerobic Table Tennis part of the Active Women Project.”

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Here is a story from one of our readers.

Hi Alois

You might find this hard to believe but at the age of 75 I am still playing competitively and even crazier still hoping to improve!

I am English and have lived in France for the past five years. Table tennis here is very well organised, lots of clubs with excellent facilities all provided by the government. The funding of sport here for the community is a million times better than the UK which came as a surprise to me. I started as far back as 1949 playing in the leagues in the UK and continued for around 45 years giving up finally in my late 50′s. When I moved to France in 2007 I had not played for around 15 years but decided to join a club just for fun and to enjoy it, I had no intention of taking it seriously again. My first visit was a bit intimidating, a large hall with about 20 tables with some very fit young men bashing the ball hard with a coach barking instructions.

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I’d love to make the following observations about the match strategy course

1. It is a great initiative and I have found these episodes very helpful.
2. I really liked your incorporation of clips from real matches that you used to demonstrate the points being made.
3. I still can’t believe that we get the benefit of all of Alois’ experience simply by being a member of PingSkills Premium. So a very, very big thank you to both of you for making this possible.

Chris Roe

PingSkills Match Strategy Course Videos

Check out the list of videos available in the PingSkills Match Strategy Course

When you step out on the court, what you should you be thinking about tactically? How do you develop a game plan?

Well there are certain tactics that you should have in your mind. We’ve developed the PingSkills Vault to help you keep track of these things. When you create a new opponent, you’ll be presented with a list of questions to help you get started.

To help you understand the types of information to record, we’ve created a video called game plan as part of our match strategy course in our premium lessons. In this video Alois takes you through the tactics he would use against me in a match.

To make things equal I’ve recorded the tactics I would use against Alois.
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A huge thank you to everyone for supporting us here on the website and on our Facebook page. We’ve just passed the 2,000 likes figure which is a huge number of people.

On our Facebook page, we post interesting questions, ask for your feedback and let you know when we have new videos on our site. So if you haven’t liked us yet then head over to our Facebook page and click the LIKE button!

Now if you ask a question, and we answer it with an exclusive premium member only video response, you can watch the video even if you’re not a premium member. We feel that since you asked the question, you deserve to see the video.

If you’ve previously asked a question that we’ve filmed a premium only video response to, you can now go back and watch the video. The easiest way to find your questions is using the My Questions link. Answers with a premium video response are marked with a “P”.

I hope you enjoy the new changes.

Matt Hetherington is having a competition on his blog. Each day he will reveal some more clues about a player and you need to guess who it is. You are allowed only 1 entry. All correct entries will go into the draw to win the prizes. Those who guess the athlete in the last 3 days will get 1 entry into the draw. If you guess correctly before then you’ll get a bonus entry! There are 2 Super Packs up for grabs.

To find out all about the competition and how you can be a part, check out all the rules on Matt’s blog.

Good luck!