My initial introduction to PATT (Principles Approach to Table Tennis) was from several thought provoking articles that were posted on the About.com table tennis forum by Donn Olsen, its creator. Intrigued, I decided to check out the website associated with PATT (http://thepattinstitute.com/default.aspx), which contained more articles about table tennis which were more than a simple regurgitation of the same old information.

I noticed on the website that Donn had co-authored a book that contained the basic principles of PATT, and so I wrote a brief blog post discussing what I had seen of the PATT approach, and informing my readers of the availability of the book.

Not long after, I was contacted by the books co-author, Kyongsook Kim, who thanked me for the blog post and offered to send me a copy of the book to read and review. I was happy to take her up on her kind offer, and I just received the book on Monday. This was great timing, since I was flying to New Zealand the next day, and now I had something to read on the plane!

This article is not an in-depth review of the PATT book - I haven't had the book long enough to really do it justice. I read the book from cover to cover while flying to New Zealand, but I haven't gone back to study it in detail yet, so this is more of a "first thoughts" review. I'll need a while to re-read, think over and try to apply the material presented in the book before feeling ready to write a full review, but in the meantime I thought I'd share my first impressions and what I took away from my initial reading of the book.

Summary

I'll start with my general impressions of the book first - then get into some more specifics. It's now two days since I read PATT, so things are still fairly fresh in my mind, although it would be fair to say that I've probably forgotten a lot of things as well - you can't expect to fully retain everything after just one read through.
My overall conclusion is that there is a lot of value in this book for any table tennis enthusiast, although the book is directed more at coaches than players. While reading the book, I encountered a few new concepts and approaches, and a fresh spin on some other concepts that gave me a new perspective about them, all within a structured framework that the authors have obviously spent a great deal of time and effort organizing into a logical system. I definitely want to go back and study this book in more detail - I am sure that I have only scraped the surface of what is presented in my first read through. This is partly because there is a wealth of information in the book, much of which requires some serious thought, and also partly because the book is written in an academic style of language which sometimes makes it hard going to understand what the authors are trying to say.

So yes, I think this book is worthy of your attention. If you don't learn a few valuable lessons from reading this book, I'd be much surprised. Be prepared to work for it though.

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