Abstract
The aim of the study was to compare elite junior and senior women table tennis players, using three parameters of the table tennis: rally length, serve and receive analysis. Twenty-five junior and twenty-five elite senior matches were analysed (total: 263 sets and 4958 points) between players ranked in Top 25 in ETTU rankings in the last two years. All the athletes used an offensive style of play. The results of non-parametric Mann-Whitney U Test, showed a significantly higher rally length in senior compared to junior category (4.46 vs. 3.93). Moreover, the results of Pearson's Chi-square tests show an association between the age categories and selected parameters (laterality, technique and placement) for both serve and receive. Different behavior between the two categories was noted. The senior players used more the flip technique (22.2 % vs 14.7 %) and short push to return the services of the opponents (32.5 % vs 26.0 %). These results provide useful information to analyze junior players' behavior compared to the senior players in order to plan specific training sessions. It can be also useful to identify some parameters as predictors of the future success for junior players.
Highlights
The career of an athlete is influenced by several factors and is characterized by different periods of transition
A Mann-Whitney test indicated that the difference in rally length between the senior category (Mdn = 4.46) and the junior category (Mdn = 3.93) was statistically significant, U (Nsenior = 2668, Njunior = 2286) = 2592280.00, z = -9.228, p
The results show that forehand service is the most used for both junior and senior players (FH serviceJunior = 88.6 %, FH serviceSenior = 77.1 %)
Summary
The career of an athlete is influenced by several factors and is characterized by different periods of transition. A key moment is identified by Stambulova (2009) in the transition from junior to senior category. The best junior players are full of big expectations about their future results by coaches, managers and parents. Those expectations are based on talent, ability and/or results in the youth categories. In many cases, those expectations are not based on objective parameters and did not consider that the transition from junior to senior category seems to be one of the biggest obstacles in an athlete’s career. As Stambulova (2009) concluded that this transition divided athletes into two equal parts, the larger one stalled and moved on to recreational level sports or terminated their participation and the smaller one continued on to the elite senior level
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