The '1 Star' Event in Worthing and the Gap at the Base of England's Junior Table Tennis Pyramid

The '1 Star' Event in Worthing and the Gap at the Base of England's Junior Table Tennis Pyramid

A pair of shoes and a small noticeboard

In Worthing, a seaside town in southern England, someone taped a small notice to the door of the Worthing Table Tennis Club hall. It listed Saturday 10 October, the name Junior Team 1 Star, and a short line explaining that two-player teams would play a progressive knockout. No sponsor banners, no television, no electronic scoreboard. Just children, bats with worn handles, and parents on plastic chairs waiting for their turn at the table.

Looking at that notice made me think of another pair of shoes, in another country, years ago. The worn soles of Mr Le Van Sy, seventy years old, who walked from Hanoi through Yunnan and Kazakhstan to Russia carrying a red flag shirt with a yellow star and the story of a son who once played at the SEA Games. I wrote about his bowl of instant noodles and did not mention a single scoreline. The piece was shared more than two thousand times, the most in our newsroom that year. That pair of torn shoes at the Russia World Cup travelled further than any rally I have ever called.

A junior club event in southern England is not big news by any normal measure. No world medals, no Olympic places, no sponsorship signed. But if you sit with it long enough, you see a system patching itself together. And systems that patch themselves together are always worth reading more than systems showing off their trophies.

The three tiers of English junior table tennis

To understand why a club has to create its own event, you need the map of England's junior competition structure. It has three tiers, and each tier exists for a reason.

The top tier is the Youth British Clubs League, known as the YBCL. It is England's strongest youth team competition, played on national weekends and gathering the strongest clubs. Its quality is high and so is its travel cost: long journeys, overnight stays, full squads. For a small provincial club, it is a beautiful target that is not always reachable.

The middle tier is JuniorBCL and CadetBCL. These are more localised youth team leagues with less travel, lower cost and a more flexible format. They split by age band: Cadet for the younger group, Junior for the older. They act as a hinge, keeping mid-sized clubs in regular team competition without demanding a mini national-team budget.

The bottom tier, and the tier this story belongs to, consists of supplementary events created by clubs themselves. The Worthing Junior Team 1 Star sits here. It is not a compulsory tier and not a federation-mandated layer; it is the product of a specific gap: junior teams that did not enter the YBCL, or were not selected for it, still need team match-play.

The entry deadlines of the two middle tiers say a great deal about how the system runs. JuniorBCL closed entries on Wednesday 16 September. CadetBCL closes later, on Wednesday 28 October. The Worthing event falls on Saturday 10 October, between those two dates: after one entry window has shut and before another closes. Placing an event in exactly that slot is a deliberate scheduling choice, not an accident.

Based on my experience following matches and junior tournaments, events that sit between two deadlines share one trait: they absorb the athletes the system has missed rather than competing with the system. Smart organisers do not fight for places against big events; they pick up the places big events cannot offer.

Why a coach has to start his own event

Matt Porter is head coach of Worthing Table Tennis Club. The question he asked when he launched this event was simple and professional: what can we do for our boys and the other teams that have not got in?

That question does not come from a federation meeting room. It comes from the training hall, from watching children train all year and wear a team shirt only a handful of times, sit beside a teammate, feel that there is someone behind them.

In Vietnam I have sat in many provincial halls and seen exactly that state of affairs. A club in Nha Trang or Cam Ranh has three or four students good enough to compete but not enough to field a boys' team, let alone a girls' team. They still enter singles. Singles measures ranking but not the feeling of belonging. And belonging is what keeps children in a sport longest.

Worthing won their division last year. That detail matters, because it shows the organiser is not a weak club padding its fixture list but a club with good results opening the field below it. Winning clubs have two choices: close the door to protect an advantage, or open it to create more opponents. Worthing chose the second.

Across the Channel, Jersey Table Tennis had its own reason to enter. Their boys' team was not going to be in the YBCL this year. That phrasing covers two possibilities: the team missed the entry, or the team was not selected. Both lead to the same outcome: a group of juniors good enough for team play with no team event to play.

For Lisa De Poerck of Jersey Table Tennis, an event in Worthing answers both a sporting and a psychological problem. The children need to leave the island. They need to play strangers. They need to lose a match before a real season begins.

Progressive knockout: losing still means playing on

The most revealing technical detail in the event announcement is the format. Two-player teams compete in a progressive knockout. A team that loses its first match is not eliminated; it drops into another branch and keeps playing.

For anyone who has worked in table tennis for years, this detail reveals the entire philosophy of the event. A pure knockout exists to find a champion quickly, and it takes from the weakest team the one thing it needs most: time at the table. A team losing twice before lunch can go home at noon with two games and a bad taste.

A progressive format reverses the objective. A champion still emerges, but the main product of the day is not the name on the trophy; it is the number of matches each child plays. For juniors learning to compete, three matches in a day are worth far more than one match and elimination. Table tennis builds feel through touches under real pressure, and nothing replaces that pressure, not even long training sessions.

The two-player team format adds its own problems that singles never raises: who plays first, who takes the deciding game, how a teammate on a bad day is lifted, how a teammate on a good day does not drag the pair down with overconfidence. These are skills the club describes as development both on and off the table.

Old tapes run in slow motion, but memory always runs faster. I have watched countless recordings of junior team matches, and what I remember is not the best rallies. I remember children standing beside the table, gripping a towel, counting points under their breath for a teammate. Technique can be learned anywhere. That feeling only exists in team competition.

The geography problem of the Channel Islands

One detail in this story reaches beyond England's borders: teams from Jersey and Guernsey are taking part.

Jersey and Guernsey are Channel Islands, sitting off the French coast, administered within the British system but not on the mainland. For a junior team in Jersey, entering an event in Worthing means ferry tickets, accommodation, budgeting and convincing parents the trip is worth it. Entering a YBCL weekend further away on the mainland costs several times more.

This explains why Jersey's absence from the YBCL may have little to do with playing level. In a system built on national weekends, distance is a genuine competitive barrier. A good team far from the centre can be removed from the game by a type of cost no championship table records.

A local event on England's south coast solves exactly that problem. It does not demand days of travel. It does not demand a full squad. It gives two islands a nearby destination and gives a coastal club a day of competition with an international flavour without staging an actual international event.

I remember trips from Nha Trang to Da Nang or Ho Chi Minh City for junior table tennis. More than four hundred kilometres, a night in shared accommodation, and two days of competition that sometimes gave a child no more matches than a normal training session at home. Travel cost per match is a metric nobody publishes, yet it decides who competes and who stays home. If there were a two-player team event in Nha Trang, or Phan Rang, or Quy Nhon, the number of children playing competitive table tennis in central Vietnam each year would look very different.

The co-production model: when the federation stands beside you

The second notable feature is how this event came into being.

The club thanks Neil Rogers and John Mackey, representing Table Tennis England and a body referred to as TAP. The journey from initial idea to scheduled event is described as a quick turnaround. To anyone who has worked with federations, that phrase carries a lot of information.

A federation can intervene in grassroots events in three ways. The first is to forbid: no standard, no event. The second is to run it centrally, with clubs registering and waiting. The third is to stand beside: the club invents it, the federation green-lights it, supports it technically and allows the official competition system to be used.

The third is what is happening here. It has an obvious economic advantage: the club or parents carry the organisational cost while the federation expands competitive days for a junior age group with limited resources. For a federation dividing a budget between the national team and the grassroots system, this is a rational choice.

But co-production has a flip side. When cost is pushed down to clubs, capacity is pushed down too. Places with an enthusiastic coach, a hall and willing parents get events. Places without them keep getting nothing, and that gap is then recorded in a neutral phrase: development disparity.

I do not want to paint a bleak picture of this model, because I believe it is far better than waiting. But a sports writer has a duty to state one thing clearly: if grassroots event supply depends on the goodwill of individuals, that supply will be as uneven as the fortunes of a few individuals. What depends on one person disappears with that person, unless someone turns it into a rule.

Seen from Nha Trang: what shape does the gap take in Vietnam?

I live in Nha Trang and work as a multi-sport commentator, but table tennis is my core expertise. So when I read about a junior event in Worthing, my first reflex is to compare it with what I see weekly at home.

In Vietnam, junior competition centres on national age-group championships, regional junior events and provincial talent pathways. The quality is good, but the density is thin. A junior in a province may have only a few official competitions a year. The rest is training, and training without competition days makes progress hard to measure.

Team table tennis is rarer still. In national championships, team events are often treated as secondary to singles. There are objective reasons: a team event needs several players of similar level in one unit, and few units qualify. There are also subjective ones: organisers prefer formats that are tidy, easy to schedule and easy to score. Teams are not tidy.

The gap in England takes the shape of a two-player club event. The gap in Vietnam, I believe, takes the shape of cluster competition days. Central provinces such as Khanh Hoa, Phu Yen, Ninh Thuan and Binh Dinh have enough clubs, coaches and children for a two-player team day once a quarter. No big arena needed. No international referees needed. It needs one person to step up, one federation to green-light it, and one small notice on a door.

I know that is easy to say. I also know the hard part lies elsewhere: how to keep the person who steps up from burning out after the first season. But there is one thing my own job taught me. The stumble of 2026 taught me that audiences need real people, not perfect ones. A grassroots event is the same. It does not need to be perfect. It needs to exist, to repeat, to become a habit in children's calendars.

One hundred and twelve podcast episodes are one hundred and twelve times I sat down to listen to the field breathe. After years of that, I have drawn one conclusion about every sport with a net and a table: most talent erodes not through lack of technique, but through lack of chances to show that technique in front of others. Those chances do not appear by themselves. Someone has to make them.

The counter-intuitive angle: an event that is not built to find a champion

Now for the part I consider most important, and the part most easily skimmed.

People assume every tournament exists to find the best player. That is true of professional events, where prize money and ranking are ends in themselves. It is false at the bottom of the pyramid. There, events exist to keep people in the sport.

Look at the specifics. The event runs on Saturday 10 October, uses a progressive knockout, in two-player teams, bringing together Worthing, two Jersey teams and Guernsey. The field is small. Matches per team is the central design objective. A champion will be identified, but if every team goes home with at least three matches, the organiser's real goal is met.

This is the point many table tennis fans miss. We are used to judging an event by its peak: was the final good, were there stars. For grassroots junior events, quality lies at the base: did the weakest team get a decent day.

If this event crowns a champion and abandons five teams after two hours, it is a bad event however good the final is. If it crowns a champion and gives every team an afternoon worth remembering, it is a good event despite modest standards. It all depends on what you choose to measure.

I have attended junior days in Vietnam where eliminated teams sat in the stands on their phones while organisers rushed the semi-finals to beat the clock. Nobody broke a rule. But a child eliminated after two games learned an unwanted lesson: travelling far and being knocked out fast is normal. Repeat that lesson a few times and the child stops travelling.

That is why I treat a small format decision like a progressive knockout as more important than any sponsor list at a big event. It says: we know why these children came.

The risk named after one person

There is a risk in this story I want to name directly, even though it appears in no announcement line.

The event was born from the idea of a head coach. It is run by a club. It grew with the support of two specific names at the federation. For now, the whole structure stands on a small number of shoulders.

In the short term that is an advantage. A small determined group moves faster than an administrative machine. The turnaround from idea to competition day is described as quick, and I believe it, having seen Vietnamese clubs do similar things in two weeks when someone takes responsibility.

In the long term it is a weakness. Coaches change jobs. Federation staff move departments. Cohorts graduate. An event not written into an official calendar vanishes quietly, unnoticed, until someone asks why there is no event this year.

Notably, the club itself is aware of this limit. Its announcement expresses the hope that the event becomes part of the competition calendar. That hope is a form of self-awareness. It admits that one successful staging is not the same as existing.

As a commentator I am often asked why strong table tennis nations are strong. The easiest answer is talent. The truer answer is calendars. A strong table tennis nation is one with enough competition days for children at every level, and those days do not depend on whether a particular person still works at a particular club.

The '1 Star' label and useful ambiguity

One more technical detail deserves examination, because it touches my own trade.

The event is called Junior Team 1 Star. Within Table Tennis England's domestic event taxonomy, this is a low grade aimed at those entering the official competition system. The star naming lets readers place it quickly: fewer stars means closer to the entry level.

There is an interesting ambiguity here, and I think it helps more than it harms. The documentation I have does not fully define the criteria for the one-star label. Yet that looseness opens space for clubs to set their own standards. Too strict a label would make grassroots events hard to launch. A label loose enough encourages people to try.

I have seen the opposite in my own work. Nothing paralyses grassroots initiative faster than a set of standards written by people who have never organised anything. When every small procedure requires a meeting, the most enthusiastic people withdraw first, because they understand the time cost of each meeting better than anyone.

Ambiguity has limits, though. If nobody can define the label, parents cannot judge what the event is worth for their child. In every country, table tennis has a large group of parents weighing tuition, travel and time. They need a clear reason. A clear label is a cheap and effective reason.

The sensible balance, in my view, sits here: clear enough for parents to understand it is an entry-level event, soft enough that a club does not wait three months for an approval slip.

What I will watch after 10 October

After the event there will be a results sheet. There will be a winning team, some teams with more wins than losses, some with fewer. There will be photographs of children standing together, bats held loosely, eyes tired, mouths smiling. Those photographs will appear in no newspaper.

What matters will not be on the results sheet. It will be whether the event reappears in next season's calendar, whether clubs elsewhere look at it and ask why they have not done the same, whether Table Tennis England turns initiatives like this into an official tier. Those signals take six to twelve months to surface, and they are far harder to measure than a title.

At forty-five I still watch football like a second-year student, except with ginger tea. And like that student, I believe something simple: sport is a common language, but that language is only learned when someone raises a loudspeaker and says this court is open to anyone who wants to walk in. A small notice in Worthing is one such loudspeaker. The remaining question is not volume, but whether anyone raises it a second time next year.