VALIDITY OF SPECIFIC MOTOR SKILLS IN PREDICTING TABLE-TENNIS PERFORMANCE IN NOVICE PLAYERS.

An experiment assessed whether novice table-tennis players' ball-balancing and bouncing skills could predict their performances after a semester of being coached. A pretest-posttest design was used to test this hypothesis with 82 male and 77 female physical education students who initially performed the skills and subsequently participated in a round-robin tournament. Moderate negative but significant (p <.01) Spearman rank-order correlation coefficients were obtained between some of the ball control skills scores and overall ranking in the table-tennis tournament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]