One of the most storied players in American table tennis history, Dan Seemiller. He first qualified for the US Team in 1972, was the top ranked player in the country by 1974, won five US National Championships, and logged an amazing international record that at one point included completing two consecutive World Team Championships without losing a match. Later in his career, he became a highly decorated and successful coach, a tournament promoter and director, an author, and he also served as President of USTTA.
The signature grip and style that bears his name is still referred to by many internationally as “the American grip”. Seemiller is the quintessential “American” player – with emotion and grit and heart.
In February, as Dan was training for the Olympic Trials, he began posting memories to his Facebook page. Over the next few weeks, we are going to share some of those photos and quotes in this series “Seemiller – The American”:
I got a little excited (see photo) winning the 4th game. The score was now 2-2 against World No.2 in Tokyo 1983. It was always my dream to beat the Chinese in the World Championships. I was extra motivated in this match because Cai Zhen Hua was very disrespectful to me early on in the match. He was always like that with other players but no one ever took him up on it. Two times early on I popped up his serve and after he loop killed he did a full 360 – making fun of me. I walked right up to him and said if you ever do that again…..I’ll leave it at that. I led 10-8 in game 5 before losing after the 20 minute delay. The delay followed a fault serve called on Cai that was eventually taken away by the referee. The Chinese always got their way. Check out Cai walking away somberly in the background. When the main referee, not the umpire of the match, changed the score. The score changed from 11-8 to 10-8 and I lost my focus. Cai was nervous before the break and I was nervous after.
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The Google Sheets image takes you to a spreadsheet that gives the settings for each drill. While these won’t be the exact settings for the Control Panel on your robot, they will give you an idea of where to start, and you’ll need to adjust from there. At the bottom, we’ve included the ranges and defaults for the setting on a Prime so you can compare these to the ranges and defaults on your own robot. In general, default settings should give you a similar ball regardless of what model you have. If a drill has a change of speed, spin, or trajectory, you will be unable to replicate that drill on a Basic or Start model.
Amicus Prime owners, save these drills to your device via the following steps:
Click the Drill image below to download the file to your tablet, cell phone or other device that has the Amicus app on it.
Open that file and a window will appear in the Amicus app to confirm you want to import those drills. Tap Import to add the drills to the Exercise List.
You can then play those drills just like any other drill in the Exercise List.
Tip – After importing the drills from a Fethomania Session, tap on the drill description to reveal Stefan’s technique pointers for that drill!
Amicus Prime owners, if you want a video of a Fethomania drill, you will need to manually link the video for a particular Fethomania drill with the following steps:
Download the video to the device that contains the Amicus app (probably to the Downloads folder).
Open the Amicus app on that device.
Select the matching drill in the Exercise List.
Tap on the Drill Description. The Set Exercise Properties popup window will appear.
Tap on Select Video button at the bottom of that window. Then navigate to where the video is located in the file directory and select that video.
Tap Save at bottom right of the popup window, Save at the top right of the main window, then Save in the resulting popup window.
Tap the Drill Description again and the title of the video should now appear in parentheses after Select Video.
To play the video, tap the Play Video button on the Play Exercise screen.
