OOAK Table Tennis Forum

I guess I'm mainly targeting this question to Table Tennis Australia, but I guess the same can be asked to any country's association...

When the ITTF bring in new rules/regulation, is there a process where you analyse and discuss these new rules/regulation to see of they are appropriate for the country, or is it accepted that the ITTF makes decisions for the good of all?

The reason I ask is that the ITTF has mentioned recently that new rules/regulation are generally made considering the high professional/elite players (can't remember the exact wording). I'm sure the impact on TT in general is considered, but that's not the focus.

So considering Australia probably has less than 1% of it's players at these levels, new rules/regulation may not necessarily in the best interest of Australian players...

Having universal rules for the game is good, but I don't think the ITTF should be the God of equipment.

You are absolutely right, there is a huge disconnect and it is mainly because you misunderstand the role and mandate of the ITTF. The ITTF is the governing body of the sport at the international level. The national associations govern the sport in their country or territory. The ITTF's rules, systems, methods, structure and policies are all geared for the international level. It is then up to each national association to make its own rules or to choose to adopt some or all of the ITTF rules. In England, some leagues played to 21 points up to 3 years after the change of the rule. This is because the ETTA applied the ITTF rule up to a certain level only and let the lower levels do as they please. Some national associations prefer to adopt ALL ITTF rules to the letter. It's their choice.
I fully understabd all players who are frusteted regarding the regulations on equipment. The VOC ban was a must. It is to respect IOCs Agenda 21 and of course according to a long standing decision in the ITTF to have a clean sport free of toxic materials. We may agree or not on this but it's a fact that now everyone has to adopt and accept. There is no going back. Glue was meant as an adhesive and not as a performance enhancing tool. Now regarding Boosters and the such, they were never legal, ever! The rule was further clarified with the 2.4.7 rule adopted with more than 90% approval at our AGM. It is not ITTF's fault that players were breaking the rule already. We have received direction from the membershuip that the rules should be enforced strictly and we set out to do that. As I said on another forum I am very sorry that it is affecting our generation of players, this is something we cannot avoid if we want to respect and implement our rules as they have been formulated by the membership. This is the same as previous changes of rules (sandpaper rackets, thick sponge rackets, finger spin ban, etc.) in the past. It affected that generation at that time.

I thank you for your well-thought-out comment, and I must agree with your assessment. But it makes more sense if you put things in the correct perspective. The ITTF governs the "International" level of our sport only. If a disconnect also exists with national associations then something is wrong and you should get involved to have your message heard.

I for one wouldn't support the idea of National associations having their own set of rules. Let's say that Sweden decided to allow boosters while ITTF don't. The result would be, that in our national team, we would pick the best players to represent us, but picking them from their boosted performance. It's by no means certain that these players are the best with out the boosters and even if it turns out they are, once they are being called up to play at international level, they would have to adopt real quickly to play with their non boosted equipment.

Alright, let's legalise boosters at the lower levels then? No, certainly not, cause if ITTF's main reason for banning speed glue and boosters are the high level of VOC's in them, then allowing them at low levels would be a worst case scenario as I'm sure that top players have better possibilities to use it in a safe way, so banning it for them while allowing us to boost and glue in the kitchen would be pretty dumb...

I want to have the same rule as the international players have, but in some cases, a bigger acceptance might be on it's place, such as height of throw for a serve were low level players shouldn't be judged as hard as professionals.