Meet Oliver Alke, compass coach who highlights the importance of building trust with players for their personal and sport development and creating a positive learning environment.

“The most important thing is always the person and the pedagogy, i.e., how to understand and then communicate with the child, based on their individual thinking. The key is to build a trusting relationship so great things can be achieved together. Only once this is in place will it be possible to support a child in their development, to help them achieve high goals.”

This is how Oliver ‘Olli’ Alke, a successful table tennis coach from Hamburg, defines his mission both as a table tennis coach and as a person.

Since January 1st 2019, Olli has been working as a full-time coach for the compass Foundation. His task is to find young talent in the north of Germany and to create the most optimal conditions for them and their environment, ensuring they can grow as players and people. Simply put, doing the right thing, at the right time, with the right people.

“It’s exciting,” says Olli. “I have longed to work so intensely, in a focused way, with motivated talent and within a flexible, organised and ambitious organisation. I see the players mostly every day and often I can spend hours playing the game with them or doing multiball training.”

Multiball training is an effective tool to increase the speed of development since it is versatile and can be used for players on all levels. It helps improve technique, and as the player advances it also serves to improve speed, reaction time and physical fitness, as well as being a lot of fun. Furthermore, it can be endlessly adapted to meet the needs of both coach and player and is an intense exercise in ‘practice makes perfect’.

Before joining compass, Olli was the state coach of the Hamburg Table Tennis Association, a job he enjoyed but found the work fragmented and felt he had to constantly be everywhere, all at once to solve all sorts of problems for the many players and clubs. This left him very little time to do a proper job at the table with the players.

“As a compass coach now, I have fewer players, which is why I am able to see them more or less every day. The cooperation between the Hamburg Table Tennis Association and compass is a ‘win-win’ and a gainful situation for all involved: the players receive more focused training and are able to develop much faster, while the federation receives support in talent scouting and development, guaranteeing them better players in the end!”

The weekend before his interview, Olli was in Berlin to meet a 9-year-old potential player and the day before that, he was about 400 km away in Schleswig-Holstein, to train with two youngsters. He had brought his own protégé, Lleyton Ullmann, who got the best training partner in Fredrik Spreckelsen, the North German Men’s Champion, and a man ten years Lleyton’s senior.

Olli was himself born in Hamburg and loves his home country very much. Prior to working with the Hamburg Table Tennis Association, for over a decade he was a professional player for the Tischtennis-Bundesliga, which is the top German professional table tennis league. He represented Germany in the 1993 World Championships and a year later became the German team champion with Grenzau.

“In the national team at that time, usually Jörg Rosskopf, Steffen Fetzner, Peter Franz and Richard Prause were the ones selected. I always fought with some other players for the last place in the squad.”

Around the year 2000, Olli ended his career as a professional table tennis player and instead, began a pedagogical education at university with a focus on caring for people with disabilities.

“There I learned a lot about general psychology, which I incorporated into my table tennis coaching. The most important thing is always people and pedagogy, knowing how to reach each other, how to connect deeper.”

That’s why he prefers to have close contact with the players he works with rather than keeping his distance from them, describing himself more as soft rather than harsh, positive rather than negative. The key to good communication is understanding the player and when Olli talks about areas of improvement, he always includes areas of success, preferring constructive feedback over criticism.

At the same time, he makes sure to show the talent the way clearly. He makes it very obvious to them exactly what is required, as well as preparing them for the difficult challenges involved when working to become an outstanding tennis player.

Addressing his own strengths and weaknesses as a coach, Olli remarks that “creativity, communication and table tennis knowledge are my strengths. I keep an open mind and believe that I can learn something from everyone I meet. I am honest and respectful and view everyone as an equal. A weakness is that I can get bored very quickly and I have problems when rigid structures limit the flexibility and creativity of my players and myself.”

Olli’s protégé Lleyton, is a player he has been working with closely for several years. Born in 2006, Lleyton trains under Olli who is his personal coach. Such a maintained relationship is the most important element of the compass concept; it is the only way to bring talent to the top.

“Lleyton is making great progress, although of course he still needs to work on many things. It’s fantastic to coach him as he works hard and a lot, is very determined and open-minded. He can already execute most shots and is winning more and more against talented older players. It’s exciting to follow his development and be a part of it at the same time.”