A few weeks back I was lucky enough to visit Budapest - Hungary. In my travels I made some time available to go and see the Wink Table Tennis centre where William Maybanks is currently in training. I guess most of you now will be aware of the WillMeOn Campaign set up to raise funds to help our local lad to get to London 2012. Well William is hard at it now training some 7 hours per day which includes 2 x 2 hours sessions of full on practice, 2 hours of fitness and 1 hours service training. Then on his weekends off he plays Table Tennis tournaments!
Well I'm fortunate enough to speak a bit of Hungarian, and I had quite a good chat with the chinese coach who runs the Wink Club (he is a bit of a character I can tell you). He explained that William has all the flair and ability but he needs to get used to playing pressure table tennis. There is a good team already assembled around William, including sports psychologist Beryl Whiting and nutritionist Lucy-Ann Prideaux and we have time to carefully build Will's competition play during the coming year with plenty of match practice in the Hungarian and Austrian senior leagues.
Check out some of the Video I have took of Will practicing here, he is in good company with the guy in red being the European junior no.1.
Wowza, pretty intense training to be honest!
Don't know many table-tennis players with the flair to do 7hour training days 5 days a week plus tournaments!
Great stuff, nice to see you have the "willing" to do this with all the people behind you Will!
Posted by: Otis Ogle | 04/15/2009 at 01:38 PM