A Small Event in Worthing and the Gap at the Base of England's Table Tennis Pyramid

“Do something for our boys, and for the teams that haven't got in.”

Matt Porter — head coach of Worthing Table Tennis Club, a coastal town in southern England — opened an internal discussion with that short line. The club's answer was not a petition to the governing body. They built an event themselves: Junior Team 1 Star, starting Saturday 10 October.

The format reveals the intent. Two players per team. Progressive knockout, meaning a single loss does not send you home, because the organisers want every player to get as many matches as possible. The goal is not to crown a champion. The goal is for the children to play.

I have a habit of reading grassroots news before big news. Everything at the elite level already has someone looking after it: money, analysts, cameras. The base usually has only a few decent people willing to step up.

The three tiers of English youth table tennis

To understand why a small event like this deserves a column, you have to look at the structure of English junior table tennis. It runs in three fairly distinct tiers.

At the top is the YouthBCL — the Youth British Clubs League, the strongest youth team competition, played across national weekends with heavy travel and high cost. Only clubs with genuine squad depth and a travel budget survive there.

The middle tier is the JuniorBCL and CadetBCL. These are regionalised leagues: less travel, lower cost, more flexible formats, split into Junior (older) and Cadet (younger) age bands.

The bottom tier is events like Worthing's Junior Team 1 Star: supplementary, club-created, outside the official calendar.

The entry deadlines show how unevenly the tiers run. The JuniorBCL closes on Wednesday 16 September. The CadetBCL closes later, on Wednesday 28 October. Worthing's event falls on 10 October, between the two.

That scheduling looks deliberate. It catches exactly the teams that were shut out of the YouthBCL, missed the deadline, or simply could not field a full squad.

Who turns up, and why they travel

The entry list tells the clearest story. Beyond Worthing, the organisers confirmed Jersey and Guernsey — two islands in the English Channel, not part of mainland Britain.

Jersey's boys' team did not make it into the YouthBCL this year. Lisa De Poerck, representing Jersey Table Tennis, confirmed as much. For them, the barrier has a name: geography. Flying across the sea for a national weekend is a cost problem before it is a technical one.

A regionalised event solves exactly that problem. The most replicable value of the model lies in pulling in children who would otherwise be left out by distance, rather than in producing better players.

Worthing is no novice. The club won its division last season. Porter talks about a commitment to developing junior players “both on and off the table” — familiar language for community clubs, where sport is treated as a way of teaching life skills rather than purely as a performance treadmill.

The governing body behind, the club in front

The governance point is worth pausing on. Table Tennis England did not organise the event. It gave the green light.

Porter thanked Neil Rogers and John Mackey, who sit within Table Tennis England's event-support group, known by the acronym TAP. He also noted that the turnaround from the first idea to a scheduled event was very quick.

A light-touch approval process like that has real practical value. A club knows its own area best. It knows which children need court time, which parents will drive, which hall is free on a Saturday. The centre sanctions and backs it; the local body runs it. Low cost, high ownership.

I have followed table tennis for more than twenty years, through World Cups and through junior events with no cameras. Based on my experience watching matches, events like this rarely produce champions. They produce something else: children who feel for the first time what it is to have a teammate beside the table, to high-five after a won point, to understand that a loss still leaves another match in which to fix things.

The two-player team format says the same thing. It fits small clubs and remote regions that cannot assemble a full squad. It demands no academy, no budget. It demands two names and one table.

Old footage runs slow, but memory always runs faster. I have rewatched countless frames of great finals, and what I remember most are usually the off-camera moments: a child sitting at the edge of the court wiping their face, a coach bending down to retie a student's shoelace.

The other side of good news

News like this is easy to read as entirely rosy. I want to slow down for a beat.

The Junior Team 1 Star exists because some teams could not get into the YouthBCL. That is an indirect admission: the official pyramid is not absorbing all junior team-play demand. If clubs keep patching the base themselves, then over time it becomes hard to tell an initiative apart from a shortfall in organisational capacity higher up.

The second risk is human. This event exists because of a few key individuals: a coach willing to think, a few officials willing to pick up the phone. The model works in the short term but is fragile in the long term. People change jobs. People get tired. The event disappears with its originator.

The third risk is definitional. The “1 Star” grade sits inside Table Tennis England's event taxonomy, and from what I have, its full definition is not set out in the announcement. The same goes for the acronym TAP. These are points to check against official Table Tennis England documentation before citing them as hard facts.

Put another way: I believe in that hall in Worthing, and I believe in the Jersey and Guernsey entry list. I am not yet convinced this becomes a fixed tier in the national calendar. That remains the organisers' hope.

What is worth keeping

The stumble of 2026 taught me this: 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 hold enough room for the children who have no slot in the big system.

The torn shoes at the Russia World Cup travelled further than any ball I have ever commentated. They taught me that sport lives where no one is filming. A hall in Worthing, one table, four children — that counts too.

What I carry away from this news item concerns Vietnam more than England. How many children hold a racket but have never once played a scored team match? And if some coach in Nha Trang, in Da Nang, in Can Tho asked Matt Porter's question, how long would it take for the answer to be a real day of competition instead of a meeting?