title: Validity of specific motor skills in predicting table-tennis performance in novice players.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sport and Physical Rehabilitation Sciences, Technikon Pretoria, P. Bag X680, Pretoria 0001, South Africa.
authors.forename: Abel L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Toriola
authors.forename: Olutoyin M
authors.initials: OM
authors.lastname: Toriola
authors.forename: Nicholas U
authors.initials: NU
authors.lastname: Igbokwe
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003163:Competitive Behavior; D005260:Female; D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009048:Motor Skills / Q000502:physiology*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013715:Tennis; D013997:Time Factors