STTC Butterfly Sunday League
January 14, 2008

Courtesy of Masaaki Tajima

Across the country, more leagues are forming with different formats and purposes than ever before. Some failed like others in the past due to myriad of reasons, but leagues are necessary in every region of our country and it needs to grow as another component of building block for our overall infrastructure.

At Sunset Table Tennis Club, the weekly league was created last year as an addition to existing training program, an event to get players to take matches more seriously and use the new strokes and moves they are learning into their games. So the league starts after the training session is over on Sundays at 3:30pm. The format is 5-6 man round robin groups by rating and two players with the best won/lost record advance to next higher group and the worst two drop to the next lower group the following week.

All players naturally want to play against higher level players because losing to higher level players is acceptable and the prospect of winning against higher level players is exciting and gets them up. In contrast, the possibly losing to lower level players become more of a threat than excitement, causing players not to try to hide their egos or play to survive rather than play to execute new learned moves, often reverting back to old ways- a major recurring problem generation after generation. The two winner/losers up and down format was designed primarily to address this issue.

Most of the league participants are students of STTC training program and are critiqued after the matches. After each season, players with best won/lost records and the most improved are given cash and or equipment awards.