Worthing TTC launches the Junior Team 1 Star: The gap at the bottom of England's table tennis pyramid

On Saturday 10 October, in Worthing — a coastal town in West Sussex, southern England — a table tennis event will take place that most people would skip in three seconds if they scrolled past the English Table Tennis Association's event listing. No prize money. No world ranking points. No player you have ever seen on television. Yet when I read that news item, I paused longer than necessary. Behind the dry name "Junior Team 1 Star" is a story I have seen many times in Vietnam, only this time told in English: a club head coach asking himself what he could do for the children who have no place in the official system, then building a competition with his own hands. Matt Porter, head coach of Worthing Table Tennis Club, said he looked around and asked himself: "What can we do for our boys and the other teams that haven't got in?" It sounds like a lament, but it is a blueprint. By now, three names have confirmed entry: Worthing, Jersey and Guernsey. Two of those are islands in the English Channel, a ferry ride from the English mainland. In an event whose name contains no hint of the word "international", the presence of two islands is the most telling detail, because it says the gap this event fills is not a gap in standards but a gap in geography and in opportunity to play. I have watched matches in many small halls, and what I have learned is this: the future of a table tennis nation is rarely decided in a final that someone streams live. It is decided on Saturday mornings that nobody films. To understand why an event this small deserves a long piece, you need to know how English youth table tennis is organised, and which tier is being left empty. Youth table tennis in England runs on a fairly clear three-tier pyramid. At the top is the Youth British Clubs League, or YBCL. This is the stage for the strongest teams, played across national weekends, meaning teams travel all over England at high cost with heavy commitment. To get into the YBCL, a team must pass a selection mechanism; simply entering is not enough. The middle tier is the JuniorBCL and the CadetBCL. These are more localised, with less travel and lower cost, and a more flexible format. They are split by age band — Cadet for the younger players, Junior for the older ones. This is where mid-sized clubs and developing players can compete regularly without an enormous budget. The bottom tier is precisely where a new cell has just appeared: supplementary events created by clubs themselves, with governing-body backing. The Junior Team 1 Star in Worthing is one such cell. Those three tiers sound complete. But looking at the pyramid on paper and looking at the children who fall off it are two different things. When Porter says "teams that haven't got in", he is not talking about standards. He is talking about children who can play, who train every week, but who have no team competition available to them. And my experience of watching matches shows something rather brutal: when a child has nowhere to compete, that child does not become a worse player — that child leaves table tennis. That is why the Jersey detail deserves close reading. According to Jersey Table Tennis, their boys' team will not be in the YBCL this year. Lisa De Poerck of Jersey Table Tennis confirmed this. An island with its own table tennis tradition, its own facilities, its own coaches — but no place in the national league. And rather than leaving the children at home, they chose to take a ferry to Worthing to play a "1 Star" event. Guernsey is the same. Two islands, one ferry crossing, one event with no ranking points. If you look through the eyes of someone who only cares about the world ranking, this is a pointless trip. If you look through the eyes of someone who works in development, this is the most important trip of those children's season. It is worth being precise about the selection mechanism, because it is the crux of the story. The YBCL is not an open event. Teams must enter and must meet criteria. That means there is a group of teams cut off at entry — not because the children are bad, but because the system only has so many places. An island of a few tens of thousands of people can hardly compete for a place against a large urban centre with hundreds of junior players. The problem here is one of resource allocation, not of talent. And that is exactly when a head coach from a coastal club decides to do what governing bodies are usually very slow to do: open another door. The competition design deserves its own analysis, because it carries a philosophy that many youth events in Asia, including Vietnam, should study. Teams consist of two players. They compete in a progressive knockout format. Specifically, a team that loses is not eliminated from the event immediately; they continue to play. The stated objective in the release is to ensure teams "continue competing" rather than being eliminated early. From a purely competitive standpoint, this is a less attractive format. There is no life-or-death tension, no knife-edge moment of a true knockout. But from a development standpoint, it is a near-perfect design. A twelve-year-old taking a ferry from Jersey to Worthing does not need a life-or-death match. That child needs to play five, six, seven matches in a day. Volume of matches produces experience; life-or-death tension only produces fear. I once watched a youth event in Saigon end with children crying outside the hall after losing their very first match, then going home with nobody knowing they had even been there. A format that guarantees every team several matches is an answer to that human problem. It tells the child that this event was designed so that you get to play, not so that you get eliminated. Two players per team is also a telling detail. A two-player team solves a very practical problem: small clubs and thinly populated regions cannot field a full five-player national-standard squad. With two-player teams, the entry threshold drops low enough that a club with only four or five children can still send a team. This design says the organisers thought from the player's side, not from the convenience of the organisers. One more detail on scale: the event sits in the "1 Star" category, the lowest tier in the English Table Tennis Association's event grading system. This tier is for entry-level, developmental events, unconnected to international ranking points. That a brand-new event chooses to stand in the lowest tier is a deliberate choice, and I think it is the right one. If it had presented itself as a major event, it would have excluded the very people it was created to serve. The calendar tells its own story. The event takes place on Saturday 10 October. The JuniorBCL entry deadline is Wednesday 16 September. The CadetBCL entry deadline is Wednesday 28 October. Place those three dates side by side. 16 September is when teams learn whether they got into the JuniorBCL. 10 October is when the new event happens. 28 October is when the CadetBCL door closes. The event is placed exactly in between: after one door shuts and before another does. This is not coincidence. It is calculation. A team that receives bad news on 16 September has almost a month to decide where to go. And they have a destination: Worthing, 10 October. At the same time, teams considering the CadetBCL but not yet certain still have somewhere to play before their own deadline. The effect is like opening a night food stall next to the last bus out of the station — you are not competing with the restaurant, you are serving the people left behind. On geography, the presence of Jersey and Guernsey is a signal to be read correctly. These two islands are not on the English mainland. For a club in Manchester or London, the trip to the YBCL is a few hours by road. For a team in Jersey, it is a ferry and a lost day. That cost and time is the barrier that makes national events impossible for them. A regional event, in a coastal town, turns a geography problem into a solvable one. This is why the model deserves to be called a geographic-equity model. It does not compete with the national system; it patches the exact hole the national system leaves. The empty stadium of 2026 taught me that noise is not cheering. An event with thousands of screaming spectators may not nurture a single player. An event with three teams, no spectators, but which gives a child from an island seven matches in a day, may be the thing that nurtures a generation. I learned to tell those two kinds of sound apart, and I think everyone working in sport should learn it too. On governance, this is the most interesting point in the story. The English Table Tennis Association's events team, along with a body abbreviated as TAP, supported this event. Two names are mentioned: Neil Rogers and John Mackey. It must be said at once that in the source text, TAP is not spelled out in full, so I leave that open rather than inventing an interpretation. But the structure is clear: the governing body did not organise the event, it permitted and supported it. This model is often called co-production — the sport's national body and the club making it together. The governing body reduces central costs; the club gains local ownership. In many countries this is the only way to expand the base without increasing the budget. In many other countries it fails because the governing body either takes everything over or abandons it entirely. A notable detail is speed. Porter speaks of a quick turnaround from initial idea to a scheduled event. For a base-level event, that speed is a sign of light-touch, low-bureaucracy sanctioning. That is a huge short-term advantage: a club that has an idea in August can still have an event in October. Porter also mentions a "wider commitment to developing junior players both on and off the table". That phrase "off the table" is a philosophy. It says the club is not only teaching children how to loop, but how to be part of a group, how to travel together, how to lose together and eat together. In table tennis, whose essence is one person standing opposite one person, teaching children to play as a team sounds paradoxical but is enormously important. Team table tennis does not arise naturally; it must be designed. And that is why I want to raise the issue from a different angle. The worry is not whether this event succeeds. With three confirmed teams, a format guaranteeing multiple matches, and governing-body backing, it will almost certainly run smoothly. The problem is elsewhere: the entire event depends on one club, one head coach, and a few specific names. If Porter moves on, if the club changes leadership, if Neil Rogers or John Mackey leave their posts, does this event still exist? The release ends with a hope that the event becomes an annual fixture in the calendar. But hope is not a mechanism. This is a single point of failure, and it is the real risk of the whole club-initiated event model. This is where I think it should be said plainly, even knowing many will find me harsh. The co-production model has a dark side: it can disguise a capacity shortfall at the central body. When clubs look after the base themselves, the governing body can look at that and tell itself everything is fine. But if all base-level events depend on the goodwill of volunteers, what is being sustained is not a system but a small miracle. All miracles end. I am not saying the organisers intend to hide anything. I am saying the structure can drift in that direction without anyone intending it. And in grassroots sport, that is usually how systems weaken: not through one wrong decision, but through a sequence of events that were never organised again. Another point to weigh is definition. Both "1 Star" and "TAP" are not fully explained in the source text. I hold this back as a note to verify before citing, in keeping with the habit of a writer afraid of being wrong. A plausible assumption should not be turned into a fact just because it sounds reasonable. Every player is a universe of their own; I am only borrowing their glasses to watch the match. In this story, I borrow the glasses of the children in Jersey — the ones who are not named in the release, not interviewed, who leave no quotes behind. They appear only indirectly, through an adult's sentence about how "the boys will not be in the YBCL this year". But they are the centre of the story. And what they need is very simple: a match. When I write for no one, I learn to love the game without applause. I think the children of Worthing, Jersey and Guernsey are learning a similar lesson, only differently: playing at an event with no spectators, no television, no one remembering their names. But across those seven matches there is something no ranking table can measure. And this is probably where I should speak about Vietnam, because I cannot read a story like this without thinking of home. Vietnamese table tennis has a very similar problem, only at a different scale. We have national youth events for strong provinces, big centres, places with standard indoor arenas. And we have many small clubs, many good coaches in the provinces, people who nurture five or seven talented children but have no team event suited to their scale. Those children usually have only one exit: individual events. And individual events are a harsh stage, where one loss ends everything. I once sat in a provincial hall, watching a boy enter a draw in which he was the weakest. He lost all three matches, went outside and sat in silence. When I came over and asked, he said he would not compete again because "if I go, I lose anyway". That is a sentence I remember. It shows that our problem is not talent but format. We design our playing fields to find the best player, while the base needs a playing field designed to keep the most players. An event like the Junior Team 1 Star suggests a few very concrete things. First, two-player teams are an idea that can be applied immediately at provincial level, because it lowers the entry threshold to a level almost any club can meet. Second, a format guaranteeing a minimum number of matches can be applied to youth events without changing the larger structure. Third, placing an event in the window after a major event locks its entry list is a very cheap way to attract more entrants. Those three things do not require a big budget. They require someone willing to sit down and ask Matt Porter's question. At 31, I no longer believe in comebacks; I believe in continuations. A small event like this is not the comeback of English youth table tennis. It is the continuation of children who would otherwise have quit. And in sport, continuation is always harder than comeback, because it has no glorious moment for anyone to write about. I wonder what would happen if, in every province of Vietnam, one person did something similar. No governing body needed, no sponsor needed. Only a coach looking around his training hall, counting the children with no event to play in, and then starting to phone the club in the next province. A forgotten article and a match with no spectators — both wait for someone to read them again. The event in Worthing will take place, will end, and a few children will take the ferry home with a memory nobody else knows. And if the organisers' hope holds, it will return next year. When it does, the thing worth tracking is not how many teams enter, but how many of those children are still playing table tennis three years later. Table tennis, in the end, lives on small matches in places nobody watches. And if you are the person wondering what you can do for children with nowhere to play — know that the way a coastal town in England answered that question was: two players per team, one Saturday morning, and a format so that nobody has to go home after one match.