Bill Price was a table tennis champion long before he picked up a racket. Ranked eighth in the U.S., playing captain of the American Table Tennis Team, and president of the U.S. Table Tennis Association, he had toured Europe and the United States giving table tennis exhibitions. For fun.
It's hard to believe, given what elite coaches make today, that the man who produced a Wimbledon champion did it as a hobby. When he wasn't selling printing services for a St. Louis lithography firm, he was coaching. He only had one request. You had to play a year of table tennis first.
To Price, table tennis wasn't recreational. It was instructional. "They can learn tennis three times as fast." Chuck McKinley was proof.
Whatever each player did best, he maximized it. His long-time assistant Lloyd Brown described him as casual, laid-back, a deep listener and observer, someone who could take a good player and fine-tune them into a great one. In contrast to Earl Buchholz Sr., who brought hundreds of beginners into the game through sheer energy and mass instruction, Price operated differently. He watched. He waited. He made one adjustment at a time.
Price's courts were parent-free zones. They could not give input, comment, or interfere in any way. They could only watch from a distance. One coach was all one kid could handle at a time.
His students included St. Louis Hall of Fame inductees Chuck McKinley, Bobby McKinley, Mary Ann Eisel, Justina Bricka, and Jack Gorsuch. Price also wrote prolifically about what he knew, contributing roughly 200 articles on coaching to Tennis magazine. In 1971, one of those articles captured his philosophy in a single line: "Tennis must be a great game, for it grows in spite of the tennis establishment."
He eventually took his expertise to the University of Missouri, where he was hired as men's varsity tennis coach. Missouri got more than their money's worth. They won the 1975 Big Eight Conference Championship, the only conference title in program history.
And of course, he did it for free.
(1990)