Coach turns novice friend into ‘expert’ table tennis player in a year

WE all love the idea of reaching the top in our chosen field, but few of us have the patience to do it. A table tennis novice decided to try to turn pro in a year.

WE all love the idea of reaching the top in our chosen field, but few of us have the patience to do it.

Table tennis coach Ben Larcombe was fascinated by the ‘10,000 hours rule’, which says anyone can be an expert in their discipline given a modicum of skill and enough practice. But he wanted a shortcut.

The 25-year-old from London decided to try to turn his “unsporty” friend, Sam Priestley, into a table tennis champion in a year.

Coach Ben Larcombe, left, practised with newbie Sam every day for a year

Ben, who ranks between 150th — 200th of all table tennis players in England, read up on the popular theory, explored by writers including Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers), Matthew Syed (Bounce) and Daniel Coyle (The Talent Code).

He was particularly inspired by Tim Ferriss’s The 4-hour Chef, in which the writer suggests you can deconstruct a skill and get someone there in a very short time.

Ferriss defines an expert as someone in the top five per cent of all active participants in that field. Ben was more ambitious. “I define an expert as … a member of the top 1%, of active participants, in a given field, in your country,” he wrote on his blog at the start of 2014.

The sport’s governing body in England, the ETTA, said there were 25,000 people in the country playing some level of competitive table tennis, meaning Sam would have to reach the top 250 to be in the one per cent.

Sam Priestley

But the journey was far harder than either of them expected.

“I thought we would be able to ‘hack’ table tennis to an extent, but I quickly realised that in order to beat an opponent in a one-on-one type sport, you really need to be a good all-round player,” Ben told news.com.au. “If you have any major weaknesses they will find a way to exploit them.

“This makes it much more difficult to ‘hack’ than a closed skill such as ballroom dancing, here you perform a set routine and have no outside interference.”

Furthermore, Sam was no blank slate. He was actually well behind the average adult in terms of balance, coordination and fitness.

He was soon competing against players with 10 years of experience.

“While it wasn’t always easy for Sam to learn and improve, he did continue to improve, week by week, always getting better,” says Ben. “I believe that it is relatively simple to master a complex skill such as table tennis, you just need to keep working at it. But it isn’t easy because it required hours and hours of hard work, focus and dedication.”

So what helped Sam’s game? The one-on-one coaching was a real luxury, Ben says, ensuring that his mate’s mistakes were corrected before they became bad habits.

The duo also focused on winning stroke combinations, leaving out other strokes altogether, in order to speed up Sam’s progress so he could beat players with 10 years’ experience.

It suggests that the game as a whole can matter more than basic grounding.

Sam didn’t make the top one per cent, but his experience was an education.

Sam grew dedicated to the sport, won some competitive matches and now plays for a local club. He’s a very good player — but he didn’t achieve his goal.

Ben still believes it’s possible, and plans to try again with a new guinea pig in a couple of years. He hopes he’ll be a better coach by then, and intends to pick someone with a certain degree of natural talent (a prerequisite for the theory in many of the books).

In Dream On by John Richard, the author learns to play a round of golf under par after a year, a tough thing to do, Ben points out.

“I would also probably insist on a higher quantity of practice and aim to clock up at least 1000 hours during the year instead of only 500, like this time,” he adds. “We believe that we have made a good case for the argument that anyone can get good at table tennis, regardless of natural talent or sportiness, provided they put in the hard work.”

But the boys have another kind of success. A timelapse video showing one second of Sam playing or training every day over the year has had more than 400,000 views on YouTube.

It seems the idea resonates with everyone.

We want to believe we too could be great, if we only had the time.

Find out more about the Expert in a Year project here.

Ben, 25, says he still believes the ‘10,000 hours’ idea is realistic.