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.