The scientific approach behind Australia’s table tennis Paralympic medals

When Table Tennis Australia National Head Coach (Para) Alois Rosario met Paralympics Australia Innovation Lead Ross Pinder at a conference in 2013, neither of them could have predicted that their partnership would have played such a crucial role in Australia’s success at the Paralympic Games in Tokyo.

Soon after their first meeting, Pinder and Rosario started exploring ideas to improve the Australian team training environment and ultimately enable better athlete performance on match day. 

Pinder said that over the last seven years they have questioned everything and looked at how they could make each aspect of training and game-day performance more effective.

 “I started to be involved with the team in 2014 when an opportunity to work with Sam [von Einem] came up,” Pinder explained.

 “Sam had just been classified and could potentially qualify for Rio, but at the time he was seen more as a medal prospect for Tokyo. That gave us the opportunity to try something different,” he said.

Working with Rosario and previous para-table tennis National Head Coach Roger Massie, Pinder started challenging some of the established beliefs around table tennis practice, which over the subsequent years led to significant shifts in coaching philosophy, athlete engagement, and the role of video analysis to influence practice and competition preparation.
 
“There is a very strong culture in table tennis built around the idea of real heavy repetition. While repetition and volume of practice have an impact, they don’t really align with other principles of learning, such as dealing with increased variability and contextual information. 

“So we thought there was an opportunity there to get a bit of competitive advantage by incorporating those ideas,” he said.

Pinder and Rosario started developing playbooks with detailed information on the Australian athletes' opponents, which included match strategies, key point analysis and video reviews. Von Einem responded very well to that approach and went on to win a silver medal in Rio, on Paralympic debut. After that first positive experience, Rosario and Pinder’s focus switched towards improving the system.

“We focused on making these playbooks a living, breathing concept that the athletes could use daily and that could underpin their whole practice. We didn’t want something that they could use only in competition, but something they can think about while they’re training.” Pinder said.

Fast forward to the last six months before the Tokyo Games, and coaches were using data analysis and video reviews to simulate competition during training sessions. After studying years worth of data, they would crunch the numbers and use the figures to map out the patterns of placements, serves and returns of Australian players’ potential opponents. 

They would then brief training partners to replicate those patterns in training, so that players could face challenges similar to the ones they would eventually experience in real matches. 

Pinder acknowledged that each player’s style is quite unique, so ultimately this method is an approximation, but it still gives coaches more confidence in the athletes’ preparation going into a major tournament. 

“There's always a few changes and a few tweaks to be made and that's part of my role here,” Pinder said.

Pinder’s role didn’t stop with training, though. Once in Tokyo, he used data to help coaches make better performance decisions. Working remotely with Sam Wells - TTA’s Lead Performance Analyst, who was based in Australia - he used the early stages of the Games to analyse match footage and provide new insights on the Australian team’s potential opponents, allowing coaches to tweak their plans and devise the best possible playing strategy.

In post-match interviews during the Games, Australian athletes repeatedly commented on how much more comfortable and relaxed they felt thanks to the information they were receiving from the coaching staff. Tokyo 2020 silver medallist Lin Ma in particular was able to use data provided by Pinder and Rosario to eventually beat an opponent he had previously lost twice against.

“He turned it around in a really emphatic way,” Rosario said. “That’s the whole point of what we’re doing as far as analysis and those results make it all worthwhile.”

When Aussie gold medalist Qian Yang defeated Polish champion Natalya Partyka in an epic 5-game semifinal, she too commented that the information she received from the coaching staff had made a difference.

 “We did provide Qian with information and data on Partyka, but ultimately she just played an incredible match,” Rosario said. “Her skill level was way beyond what we had seen from her over the last year.”

“That information is just helping the athletes with that last little percent to be able to go out onto the court confidently and execute tactically,” he said.

 TTA’s coaching staff is now looking to capitalise on the success of the Tokyo Games and continue developing their training methods, looking for more ways to simulate the situations the players are going to encounter in the lead up to the 2024 Olympics.

“For us the key is to maximise opportunities for learning and apply techniques that will allow players to deal with pressure in context, rather than focusing on volume and repetition,” Pinder said. “Reinforcing that focus around decision making and variability in training is going to be the next step.”

Rosario also noted that these training methods might become even more important if the uncertainty around international competition continues. 

“Lack of competition is certainly an issue. We’re trying to simulate that environment in training as much as possible, but there is always that icing on the cake of actually doing it, finding yourself under the pump at 9-9 and finding out what you can do,” Rosario said. 

Pinder agreed that it’s almost impossible to replicate the feeling of being in a competitive environment, but consistently designing challenging training scenarios can still be beneficial for the athlete’s development.

“We put our athletes under pressure all the time in training - not the same pressure, but it’s important to give them context and things they have to challenge themselves with,” he said.

“That’s something more sports will have to deal with in the next three years as international travel and competition opportunities will still be limited.”