Worthing launches '1 Star' junior team event: when the base of England's table tennis pyramid speaks up

In Worthing, a seaside town in southern England, a question was raised not in a federation meeting room but at a club gathering. Matt Porter, head coach of Worthing Table Tennis Club, looked at his pupils and asked his colleagues: what can we do for our boys, and for the other teams that haven't got in? On the surface, it was the question of a teacher worried that his students have nowhere to play. But it touched a reality few news bulletins bother to state: not every child holding a table tennis racket in England has a team competition to enter.

The answer to that question is called Junior Team 1 Star, held on Saturday 10 October, initiated by Worthing TTC with the backing of Table Tennis England. The initial entry list includes Worthing, two teams from the island of Jersey and one from Guernsey. A small event, local in the truest sense, with no prize money and no international ranking points. Yet if you peel away the "club news" shell, it is a piece that reveals how English youth table tennis actually operates, and how gaps at the base of a system get filled.

I have a habit of reading this kind of bulletin more slowly than usual. My experience following matches and grassroots events tells me one thing: what happens at the lowest tier often determines who stands at the highest tier ten years later. The stumble of 2026 taught me that audiences need real people, not perfect ones — and small events like this are exactly where real people show up: nervous hands, wrong names, then quiet correction.

England's youth team competition system runs on three clear tiers. The top tier is the Youth British Clubs League (YouthBCL), gathering the strongest teams, played over national weekends and carrying heavy travel costs. Below it are JuniorBCL and CadetBCL, more localised, less travel, lower cost and a more flexible format. At the bottom are supplementary events run by clubs themselves — and Junior Team 1 Star sits precisely at this tier.

The middle tier splits by age band: Cadet is the younger group, Junior the older. Both were designed to reduce travel burden and cost while keeping team competitiveness. They remain official competitions, with calendars and entry deadlines. Specifically, the JuniorBCL entry deadline is Wednesday 16 September, while the CadetBCL deadline is Wednesday 28 October.

What is worth pausing on: the date of the 1 Star event — 10 October — falls between those two entry deadlines. It takes place after the JuniorBCL entry window has closed, but before the CadetBCL window shuts. On the calendar, that coincidence is not meaningless. A supplementary event placed exactly in that window can catch teams that just missed JuniorBCL, and teams that have not yet decided on CadetBCL. It is a net placed across the gap.

The bottom tier has no fixed calendar. It lives on people like Porter. This is the crux of the whole story: a three-tier system sounds complete, but the lowest tier does not run itself. Someone has to step up, and whether someone steps up depends on people, not on regulations.

Where the gap lies

The reason this event exists is stated almost plainly in Porter's words: Jersey had a boys' team that wasn't going to be in the YouthBCL, and Jersey as a whole did not make it into the YouthBCL this year. For an island off the English coast, missing the national competition is not necessarily a question of ability. It may simply be a question of geography: travel, cost, logistics. When a junior team in the Channel Islands wants to play team table tennis but has no place in the national system, it falls into a blank zone.

Two Jersey teams and one Guernsey team appear on the entry list. That is evidence the demand is real. Nobody travels from an island to the mainland for an event they do not need. The demand for team match-play among juniors below YouthBCL standard exceeds what the official competition system is absorbing. This is the most important point the news item inadvertently reveals.

Worthing TTC is not a bottom-rung club. They won their division last season. A reigning champion going out of its way to build extra playing space for teams that cannot get into the main draw — that is the behaviour of a club that understands the system needs more doors in, not just one.

The format states the philosophy

The format is also worth pausing on. Teams play as two-player units, in a progressive knockout format. The phrase "progressive knockout" sounds paradoxical, but it states the event's philosophy: a team is not eliminated after a single defeat. They keep playing. The goal of this format is not to crown a champion fastest, but to ensure every team plays as many matches as possible.

For a development event, matches played matter more than matches won. A child learns most from the third or fourth match, once the rhythm is familiar and the hands stop trembling. A pure knockout can send a weak team home after two matches, just as they were warming up. The progressive format keeps them on court, competing, learning. The two-player format is also a deliberate choice: it suits small clubs or regions that cannot field full squads. Teams that "haven't got in" to the main competition, after all, tend to be thin on numbers.

There is a lesson here that Vietnamese table tennis could look at. Domestic youth events are usually designed to crown a champion, with cut-throat knockout rounds. That approach benefits the strongest but easily discourages newcomers. A format that keeps people on court longer is a format that keeps people in the sport longer. Old footage plays in slow motion, but memory always runs faster.

How team table tennis differs from singles

There is a technical aspect worth spelling out, because it is often overlooked when discussing youth table tennis. Table tennis is a sport where every point is personal: one person holds the racket, one person is responsible. But placed in a team format, the sport teaches things singles cannot. It teaches how to sit on the bench and cheer for a teammate right after losing yourself. It teaches how to take responsibility before a small collective. It teaches how to stand up after a lost point because the person beside you is watching.

For Cadet and Junior age groups, those lessons matter no less than a loop shot. A twelve-year-old may not remember who they lost to in the group stage. But they will remember the first time they played for a team, wore a uniform, and heard applause when they scored. This is why team events at the development tier carry a value of their own, one that individual tournaments cannot replace.

The co-production model

What sets this event apart is how it was organised. Table Tennis England did not order it into being. The club acted first, then sought backing. Porter thanked Neil Rogers and John Mackey of Table Tennis England and the TAP programme for their support. He also mentioned the "quick turnaround from initial idea to scheduled event" — a small detail that says a great deal about the lightweight sanctioning process for sub-elite events in England.

The acronym TAP is not explained in the original news item, but placed beside Porter's thanks, it can be guessed to be a Table Tennis England support programme or body. This model is called co-production: a national governing body and a local club jointly staging an event, rather than one side ordering and the other executing. Low central cost, high local ownership, fast speed.

Looking at how Worthing TTC describes itself, a fairly clear youth-development philosophy emerges: a commitment to developing junior players "both on and off the table". That phrase "off the table" is worth keeping. It shows the club measures its pupils by achievement and by human growth alike. For a community club, that is the right way to speak.

One more note on the "1 Star" grading. In English table tennis's competition taxonomy, events are graded by star rating, with 1 Star sitting at the lowest level — the equivalent of an entry-level event. The official definition of this grade is not stated in the original news item, but the fact that it is a 1 Star event reinforces the assessment: this is a development arena, not yet a performance arena.

Why events like this measure the health of a table tennis nation

In sport, people usually measure a country's strength by medals on the international stage. But there is another measure, slower and less glamorous: the retention rate of players in their teenage years. Table tennis is a sport with a high dropout rate around puberty, when children shift from playing for fun to playing to compete. That transition is when many children leave the sport, not because they are weak, but because they cannot find a playing field suited to their level.

A team event for the sub-national-standard cohort is precisely a retention tool. It tells an eleven-year-old: if you are not yet good enough for the strongest team, there is still a place for you to play. That sentence, in youth sport, is worth more than a lone medal. It turns a child from an outsider into a member of a collective.

Geography and regional equity

Jersey and Guernsey are two islands in the Channel Islands, off the English coast. For junior teams here, attending a national competition on the mainland means taking a ferry or a flight, staying overnight, and costs many times those of a team in London or Manchester. YouthBCL is played over national weekends, meaning such trips repeat several times a season. For a small island club, that is a near-insurmountable barrier.

A localised event, held in Worthing, solves exactly that geographic problem. It brings the playing field closer to teams that distance had pushed out of the system. The most replicable value of this model lies not in the format or the star grade, but in the fact that it solves a geographic problem by lowering the travel threshold. If replicated, it may be the most effective way to broaden the player base in regions far from the centre.

A counterintuitive read: when empowerment becomes abandonment

The club-run model has clear merits, and I do not want to belittle them. But there is an under-discussed downside. When a competition exists thanks to a few committed individuals, it depends on those individuals. How long will Matt Porter stay with Worthing TTC? If he leaves, does the event survive? An event built on personal relationships is effective in the short term and fragile in the long term.

There is a less optimistic reading, and I think it deserves a place on the table. A club having to step up and fill the gap is also a sign that the national governing body lacks the resources to cover the lowest tier. The federation's "light" backing — fast sanctioning, a supporting official — is a good short-term solution. But if it becomes the norm, it may mask a genuine capacity shortfall lower down.

Meticulous people tend to see boundaries. The boundary here is between "empowerment" and "abandonment". A federation that empowers clubs is a healthy federation. A federation that leaves clubs to carry its own workload is one thinning out at the base. From a single event, it is hard to tell the two apart. But there is a way to watch: if this event runs once and fades, it is a personal initiative. If it returns in next season's calendar and more clubs follow suit, it has become an unofficial structural tier.

There is another rarely mentioned risk: the pressure on amateur organisers. An event like this requires booking a hall, inviting teams, arranging officials, and sorting accommodation for teams from distant islands. That is the workload of a professional organising committee, handed to a group of volunteers. Without a mechanism to share the burden, initiatives like this tend to die of burnout rather than lack of demand.

I remember once commentating a youth table tennis match in Nha Trang, where one team had to borrow a player from another just to field enough people. That borrowed child played the best match of his life, and the following season he quit. The reason was simple: there was no place to play team table tennis regularly. A supplementary arena like Junior Team 1 Star does not produce champions. But it can be the thing that keeps a child in table tennis a few more years.

Conclusion: what to watch after 10 October

The torn shoe at the Russia World Cup travelled further than any ball I ever commentated. Events like Junior Team 1 Star travel far in their own way too: they do not produce champions, they produce children who do not give up. A team from Jersey taking a boat and a bus across the sea to play one Saturday in a seaside English town, in an event with no ranking points — that journey is itself a lesson about sport.

What I am waiting for after 10 October is not a result. I am waiting to see how many teams enter, and how many clubs follow suit next season. If the base of the pyramid knows how to speak up, the peak will benefit ten years from now. If not, we will have one more lovely club news item to read and forget.