Worthing TTC launches Junior Team 1 Star: the gap at the base of England's youth table tennis pyramid and two islands in the Channel

In Worthing, a coastal town in southern England, there is a training hall tucked behind an old industrial estate. I visited it one winter, when English table tennis was still wrestling with its biggest question: how do you keep children who are not good enough for the strongest teams playing the sport? Matt Porter, head coach of Worthing Table Tennis Club, stood beside table number four, holding a sheet of paper with the names of his students. He said something I still remember: "Our kids have nowhere to compete. So we have to create somewhere ourselves."

That was an old story. This week, that story has a new chapter.

Worthing TTC has announced it will stage the Worthing TTC Junior Team 1 Star event, scheduled for Saturday 10 October. It is not a major tournament. It is not an event with international ranking points. It is a small junior team competition, created by a local club itself to fill a gap that the official English competition system left behind.

And in the preliminary entry list, there are names few would expect: Jersey. Guernsey. Two islands in the middle of the English Channel, more than one hundred kilometres from the English coast, where table tennis is not a mass sport but a family tradition passed down from one generation to the next.

I am 51 years old, and I can still hear the whisper of a rough gem beneath the mud of an U15 court. Worthing's story begins exactly like that: a whisper, not a cheer.

The three-tier system and a gap nobody drew

Before going into detail, it is necessary to understand how England's youth table tennis system operates. Table Tennis England, the country's national governing body, runs three different tiers of youth competition, and each tier serves a group of children with very different conditions.

The top tier is the Youth British Clubs League, abbreviated YBCL. This is a national team competition for the strongest clubs in England. Teams play on designated weekends, travel across the country, and only clubs with enough squad depth can survive an entire season. YBCL is where players with ambitions of reaching the international stage are developed, and also where European scouts occasionally cast an eye.

Below YBCL are two competitions called the Junior British Clubs League and the Cadet British Clubs League. These are more localised events, with less travel, lower cost, and a more flexible format. JuniorBCL is for the older age band, CadetBCL for the younger. The entry deadlines for these two competitions in the current season are Wednesday 16 September and Wednesday 28 October respectively.

The third tier, and the one least discussed, has no formal name in the system. It is the tier of small events that clubs themselves organise, seek sanctioning for, and operate on their own. The Worthing TTC Junior Team 1 Star event sits precisely at this tier.

So what does "1 Star" mean

In Table Tennis England's domestic competition taxonomy, events are graded by the number of stars. A 1 Star event is the lowest grade, an entry-level, development-level event, one that an eleven-year-old can walk into without being overwhelmed. This is not where a national champion is discovered. This is where a child learns to stand beside a teammate, learns to lose a team match and still come back to the table the next day.

The format of the event reflects that philosophy very clearly. Teams consist of two players, not three, not five, but two. And matches are played in a progressive knockout format, meaning a team that loses one match is not immediately eliminated from the event. They keep playing, keep meeting other teams, until the tournament ends. A team can lose three matches in a row and still have a fourth, a fifth match to play.

To me, this is the single most important detail in the entire announcement. The two-player team format combined with a progressive knockout is a deliberate design to maximise the number of matches each child plays, not to find the strongest team. In youth table tennis, matches played matter more than matches won. A child who plays five matches and loses all five will improve faster than a child who plays one match, wins it, and goes home.

Two islands and a geography problem

The second thing that caught my attention was the presence of Jersey and Guernsey. These two islands are not part of mainland England. They lie in the middle of the English Channel, closer to the French coast than the English one. To reach Worthing, youth teams from these two islands must take a ferry, then a coach, and the travel cost for a single weekend of competition can exceed a small club's entire operating budget.

Because of this, youth teams from Jersey and Guernsey frequently cannot take part in YBCL. Not because they are weak. Because they are too far away. In the event announcement, Lisa De Poerck, representing Jersey Table Tennis, confirms that her boys' team will not be entering YBCL this year. That is why they are turning to a smaller, closer, cheaper event.

There are children born in the shadow of a small tournament, and all their lives they wait for a single spotlight. Jersey and Guernsey are those children. Not because they lack talent, but because geography has placed them outside the lit area of the system.

A co-production model between governing body and club

The third point worth analysing is how this event is organised. Worthing TTC is not doing everything alone. The club originated the idea, prepared the hall, invited partner teams. But Table Tennis England, through its events team and a support programme known by the acronym TAP, provided sanctioning, logistical support, and a regulatory framework. Two names thanked in the announcement are Neil Rogers and John Mackey.

In grassroots sports analysis, this model has a name: co-production. The governing body does not directly organise the event, but empowers the local club while providing official backing. Central cost falls, local ownership rises, and decision-making speeds up. Matt Porter describes the process from initial idea to scheduled date as a "quick turnaround" — a sign that England's sanctioning process is fairly light-touch for low-tier events.

Set beside the systems in Japan and China, the difference becomes clear. In Japan, grassroots youth events are usually organised by prefectural table tennis associations on an annual fixed calendar, and clubs enter rather than organise. In China, the youth development system is tied tightly to provincial training centres and sports schools, with almost no concept of a club-initiated event. In England, by contrast, the club becomes the originating unit, and the governing body the supporting one.

Europe did not teach me how to look. It taught me how to remember what I had seen. And what I have always remembered from English table tennis is its capacity to let those with the least power in the system do something with their own hands.

Why a small event is worth analysing

Some will ask: what is there to say about a 1 Star event with three participating teams? The answer lies here. Such an event cannot measure the standard of English table tennis. But it can measure the health of the base of the pyramid.

The table tennis pyramid of any country has three parts. The apex is the national teams, where media attention flows. The middle is academies and training centres, watched by the professional world. The base is the thousands of children playing at local clubs, where almost nobody looks.

The problem of the base is not a lack of talent. The problem of the base is a lack of competitive opportunity. A child can train six sessions a week, technique improving day by day, but without a tournament to test against, they will never know where they stand relative to other children. And if they do not know where they stand, they cannot know where to go.

The Worthing TTC Junior Team 1 Star event was born exactly for that reason. Matt Porter's question — "what can we do for our boys and the other teams that haven't got in?" — sounds very simple, but it hits the weakest point of the system precisely. Teams that fail to enter YBCL often have no other option. They have no competition at a level that suits them. They play scattered friendlies, or they stop playing altogether.

That is when numbers appear and become cruelly dry. I once tracked a youth training centre in Asia and watched eighteen children in one cohort quit table tennis simply because there was no tournament to enter. Not because of injury. Not because their families objected. Simply because there was nowhere to compete.

A contrarian angle: when a good story hides a bad one

This is the part I want to say slowly and carefully. A grassroots event organised by a club itself is good news. It shows initiative, community cohesion, and a commendable effort. But when such good news appears, I always ask myself: what is the bad news behind it?

The answer has two layers. The first layer: a club-initiated event is evidence that the national governing body does not have the resources to expand the competition system all the way down to the base itself. If Table Tennis England could run an open team event for every youth team that fails to enter YBCL, clubs like Worthing would not have to step in themselves. The existence of this event is a gentle reminder that the official system has a gap still unfilled.

The second layer: an event like this depends on a few specific individuals. Matt Porter thought of the idea. Lisa De Poerck brings the team from Jersey. Neil Rogers and John Mackey sanction it on the governing body's side. If any of these four people moves away, resigns, or loses interest, the event could vanish from the calendar the following season. This is the structural weakness of every co-production model built on personal relationships rather than standardised process.

This may sound pessimistic, but I do not think it is. I think it is a truth that needs to be faced directly. A system is only sustainable when it does not depend on any individual. A system that wants to grow needs individuals willing to go first. Both things are true at once, and that is the paradox of grassroots sports development.

I counted 23 contracts torn up that year. Each scrap of paper is a story untold. Among those 23 children, there were those who simply lacked one tournament to stay with table tennis three more years. Three years might have been enough for one of them to become a national player. Or not. But we will never know, because we let them walk away too early.

What to watch after 10 October

This event has three observation points that I will be tracking over the coming months.

First: whether the event actually takes place on schedule, and how many teams enter. If the number stays at three — Worthing, Jersey, Guernsey — that is a signal that demand is lower than hoped. If the number rises to five or six, demand is real and worth expanding.

Second: whether the event returns in next season's calendar. An event that happens once is a beautiful event. An event that happens twice is one with the potential to become a tradition. The difference between the two lies in whether the organisers turn it into a stable process.

Third: how many other clubs copy the model. If in the next six to twelve months two or three similar events appear in other parts of England, that is a sign a new tier is forming from below. And tiers formed from below are usually more durable than those imposed from above.

An open conclusion

To me, 10 October is not a monumental day. No international glory will be decided in a small hall in Worthing. But it may be the day when a few dozen children from two islands in the middle of the English Channel play a team table tennis match for the first time without having to travel hundreds of kilometres. To a twelve-year-old, that is bigger than any medal.

The rough gem of that year still wears its coat of dust; I have waited ten years for the rain. The rain in Worthing may be just a small shower, falling on a very small corner of a court, on a very ordinary Saturday afternoon. But small rains, falling precisely where it is driest, are sometimes the most important rains of all.

The question I leave behind is not whether this event will succeed. It is how many clubs around the world, in the next ten years, will follow Worthing's example and create a place for their children to play with their own hands.