We are currently working very hard behind the scenes to create a membership system for PingSkills. We are investigating three levels of membership.

• Free
• Plus
• Premium

The free membership will include access to everything available on the site now. You will be able to join the plus and premium memberships on a paid monthly subscription basis. The paid memberships entitle you to discounts on our DVD range and access to our exciting new web application “PingSkills Vault”.

So what is the PingSkills Vault?

The PingSkills Vault is a system that lets you keep track of your opponents and their strengths and weaknesses. You will be able to record the tactics you should employ against each opponent. By following this process you will be forced to think tactically and by refining this process you will get better and better at it. And of course if you have any questions in the process you can use the Ask the Coach application and we’ll help you out. With the paid memberships you will get some guaranteed questions each month even if we have a large backlog of questions.

Once you have analysed your opponent, you can record all of your matches against that opponent. Again you should record your analysis of the match. By recording your thoughts on the match you will get better at judging how to play different players.

In addition, the Vault lets you record your training sessions. It can be very motivational to look back after several months of training and see how much you’ve achieved. You will be made to think about a focus for each session. This makes sure that you are thinking about your training and not just turning up for the sake of it. You can also write some comments about how you felt the session went.

Why did we build the PingSkills Vault

We felt that whilst our online lessons and DVDs cover technique, there was a gap regarding tactics and motivation. To improve your game you need to learn to think tactically. The best way to improve in this area is by trying to analyse your opponents. The Vault forces you to do this. Recording all of your match results and your analysis of them further strengthens your tactical ability. Recording your training sessions makes you think about what you should be practicing and looking back over your training sessions provides you with a sense of achievement and helps keep you motivated.

Scenarios

The Vault was built to satisfy common scenarios like:

• Analyse your victory against Peter and note what tactics worked well
• Analyse the strengths and weaknesses of Melanie, your long time opponent
• Plan how to play against Paul who has a very strong forehand
• Study your loss against Zoe and record the areas you need to improve on to be more competitive next time
• Review your training over the last 3 months and the main areas you have focussed on

The Vault helps you keep track of your opponents, matches and training sessions. When we are aiming to improve our level of Table Tennis, we need to bring together training, matches and our tactical thinking. The Vault covers all these areas and allows you to improve in all these areas.

The Schedule

Over the next few weeks we’ll be revealing screenshots, descriptions, design decisions, and more. Then we’ll launch. We’ve been getting some of our players to use the Vault internally for the past couple of months. We’re very happy with it and excited to let you use it too.

Stay tuned for the next preview of the Vault.