Serving Skeletons
One particular issue that refuses to go away is the problem of enforcing the serving rules fairly. While the letter of the ITTF Laws are fairly clear in their intention of giving the receiver a clear look at the ball at all times during the service, the service rules remain very difficult to enforce, and continue to be exploited by players looking for every little edge they can get.At present, it requires two umpires (one on each side of the table) to be able to see all the angles needed to check that the service rules are being followed. Most non-International tournaments worldwide use one umpire, and in the USA it is common to have no umpire at all! And even with two umpires, it's not always easy to make sure that every current requirement of the serve is met, since this involves judging a number of angles against the position of the ball and the server's body and free arm, all in a fraction of a second.
The result? A situation where even at the elite level, illegal serves are often missed or overlooked, and there is a lack of consistency between umpires and tournaments, due to the subjective nature of the service rules.
What we need is a simple solution to the problem, which also makes it clearly obvious when the service rule is being broken, and is enforceable by a single umpire, with little or no need for judging of complicated rules in the blink of an eye.
My suggestion?
The Table Tennis Tee
Here's what I propose - the use of a table tennis tee, similar to that used in golf, but modified slightly for our purposes. The accompanying photograph shows what I mean, even though it's pretty crude. Imagine a firm plastic tube that the ball can rest on, but one that is small enough that the hand must be kept still or the ball will fall off. The tube is tall enough to reduce the chance of hitting your free hand when serving. A simple thick elastic band attached to the base of the tube can wrap around the palm of the free hand, holding the tube in place during the rally.With this simple tee, all we would have to do is make the player place his free hand firmly on the table, so that some part of the palm crosses the endline. The player then puts the ball on the tee, waits for the umpire to say "play", and then serves, hitting the stationary ball from the tee. A proviso that no part of the player other than the free hand can be in front of the ball might be useful too, to stop ingenious (and flexible!) players from putting a leg on the table in front of the ball to hide the contact.
The only thing the umpire would have to judge is whether the player has lifted his free hand before hitting the ball, but this would be relatively simple to look for, since now the umpire no longer has to be looking for cupped palms, the height of the ball toss, hidden serves or anything else. All the umpire has to see is that the free hand doesn't lift before the ball is hit. Simple!
With this method, both forehand and backhand serves are still possible, but players can no longer hide the ball, put spin on the ball when throwing it up, throw the ball backwards, or low toss the ball. All at the cost of a piece of plastic tubing and an elastic band - extremely high tech stuff!
