RebornTTEvnglist wrote:
Good interview Haggisv!
Interesting that the US is TTedge's biggest subscriber base when TT is such a small concern there. Perhaps its because its not a big market on offer there, any offerings are jumped on?
Interesting that the US is TTedge's biggest subscriber base when TT is such a small concern there. Perhaps its because its not a big market on offer there, any offerings are jumped on?
Table tennis in America is both small AND large. The number of people who actually play in some form or another is comparatively large. The number of people who go to tournaments is comparatively HUGE (because of the ratings system, players of all levels attend) compared to the rest of the world, perhaps even compared to China (where only the best play in tournaments, the others MAY be involved in, say, office and school tournaments, maybe lower level leagues). As a spectator sport? It's tiny. Americans don't think of it as a spectator sport, like they do football or basketball. This is unlike, say, China, or even Europe (and is the reason why there aren't any pro TT leagues in the US). Since it's not a spectator sport, even if there were 50,000 active tournament players in the US (this is probably not true) they will be dwarfed by the number of active football or basketball players at all levels - schools, universities (they give SCHOLARSHIPS to people to play basketball for universities!!
), professional. But that number - even a fraction of that number - would dwarf the number of active tournament players in most parts of the world nonetheless, simply because in the rest of the world there aren't tournament categories that lower level players can participate in. And all these people are intensely interested in improving their ratings, hence the intense interest in blades, rubbers, etc. Iskandar
