Worthing TTC and the Junior Team 1 Star: How a Small English Club Filled the Gap at the Base of the Table Tennis Pyramid

The question that Matt Porter, head coach of Worthing Table Tennis Club, put to the club's leadership late this summer sounded so simple it was easy to overlook. "What can we do for our boys, and for the other teams that haven't got in?" He asked it in a meeting where no one likely imagined it would lead to a new event on the English junior table tennis calendar.

But from that question, the Junior Team 1 Star was born. The event is scheduled for Saturday, 10 October, organised by Worthing Table Tennis Club with support from Table Tennis England. It is a small event. No prize money, no international ranking points, no big names in attendance. And that is precisely why it deserves attention.

I have spent 39 years sitting at the edge of courts — from Olympic arenas ablaze with light to district halls with a few dozen spectators. I once stood in a Tokyo arena in 2026, watching an Olympic final played before empty stands. I once sat in a Russian stadium in 2026, timing Mbappé's every sprint. And I learned one thing: what happens at the base of the sporting pyramid decides the fate of the summit far more than any strategic plan.

The story in Worthing is a small cross-section, but it exposes a structural problem that not only England, but Vietnam too, must confront.

The three tiers of English junior table tennis

To understand why a club in a seaside town has to organise an event itself, one must look at how English junior table tennis is structured. Currently, the youth team competition system run by Table Tennis England operates across three stacked tiers.

The top tier is the Youth British Clubs League, or YBCL. This is the strongest national youth team competition. YBCL teams must travel across England for concentrated weekend fixtures, with high travel and accommodation costs, open only to clubs with the resources and squad depth to compete nationally. Entry places are limited, and selection is based on results and the ability to meet facility requirements.

The middle tier is JuniorBCL and CadetBCL — two age-banded competitions, with Cadet for the younger band and Junior for the older. These are run regionally with shorter travel, lower costs and more flexible formats. This is the "buffer" tier Table Tennis England designed to keep local clubs inside the competition system without demanding they shoulder YBCL-level costs. The JuniorBCL entry deadline is Wednesday, 16 September, and the CadetBCL deadline is Wednesday, 28 October.

The bottom tier — which has no formal name in any governance document — consists of events run by the clubs themselves. The Junior Team 1 Star belongs here. According to Table Tennis England, the event is for two-player teams in a progressive knockout format, meaning teams are not eliminated after one loss but continue playing to maximise the number of matches each team gets.

The 1 Star event falls on 10 October — after the JuniorBCL entry window has closed but before the CadetBCL one shuts. Timing-wise, this is a narrow window, but a deliberate one. It sits where teams that just missed JuniorBCL can find a substitute arena, while teams preparing for CadetBCL still have time.

Most notably, in its very first staging, the event has already drawn entries from Jersey and Guernsey. These two islands belong to the Channel Islands, outside mainland England, hundreds of kilometres by sea and air from Worthing. It is a small signal, but one worth pondering on the nature of the gap this event is filling.

Demand with nowhere to go

Reading the story closely, I see three layers of problems stacked on one another.

The first layer is unmet demand. When Porter speaks of "the other teams that haven't got in", he is describing a reality that any sporting system with a selection mechanism faces: there are teams good enough to compete but not eligible to enter the official competition. Teams that fail to make YBCL — for reasons of level, geography, cost, or simply because places are limited — remain outside the competition system. They train, they improve, but they have nowhere to verify that improvement.

In Jersey's case, information from the event shows the island's boys' team could not take part in YBCL this year. Lisa De Poerck, representing Jersey Table Tennis, confirms this. For a small island, sending a junior team across the sea to a national competition is a logistics and cost problem of no small order. Their solution — entering a smaller event, closer in organisational terms — is evidence that geography, not level, is the main barrier.

This brings to mind a basic principle in sports development: a system is only as good as its lowest tier. If a talented child cannot access an arena for reasons beyond their control, the system is wasting talent — and worse, losing children who might have stayed with the sport for life.

The co-production model

The second layer is the organisational model. The 1 Star event was not directed top-down by Table Tennis England. It was initiated by a club coach, then supported by the national governing body in terms of sanctioning and organisation. This is a co-production model — the governing body and the club working together, rather than one side doing everything.

In its announcement, Worthing TTC thanked Neil Rogers and John Mackey of Table Tennis England — along with the body's "TAP" unit — for supporting the event. The story is described as a quick turnaround from initial idea to scheduled event. That swiftness suggests the sanctioning process for sub-national events in England is light on bureaucracy.

There is a clear upside to this model. It lowers central costs, increases local ownership, and allows initiatives to be launched by those who best understand needs on the ground. A club knows exactly what its players need; a governing body in the capital may not have that information. Empowering clubs to initiate is an efficient way to allocate resources.

But at the same time, this model raises a question about the distribution of responsibility. If the club initiates and organises, while the governing body only sanctions and supports, who is responsible for ensuring such events happen regularly, in every region, for every group? An event dependent on one individual's initiative is an event that can disappear when that individual stops.

This is a problem I have seen in many places, not just England. Grassroots initiatives are often sustained by a few devoted people, and when they stop, everything stops with them. The sustainability of grassroots sport cannot rest on individual goodwill alone. It needs mechanisms.

A format that speaks a philosophy

One detail in the announcement strikes me as more important than it appears: the progressive knockout format. In this format, teams are not eliminated after one loss. They keep playing, and each team is guaranteed a minimum number of matches.

To someone who has followed youth sport for decades, this is a design choice that says a great deal. At the development level, the goal is not to find the strongest team but to ensure every child plays as many matches as possible. A 12-year-old entering the event does not need the thrill of a knockout bracket. They need the feeling of competing, of being tested, of facing an opponent.

Playing three matches and losing all three has far higher developmental value than losing one match and going home. In the first case, the child learns to adapt to different opponents, to face consecutive defeats, to find something positive after a run of poor results. In the second, the child learns only that they are not yet good enough — a lesson that may have value, but is not the only one needed.

The two-player team format works the same way. It allows small clubs, places without enough players for a five-person team, to still send representatives. And it teaches a skill singles table tennis cannot: competing for a teammate, being accountable to the person beside you, sharing joy and disappointment. In table tennis, where most time is spent alone on court, the team experience is rare and precious.

I have seen similar events in Vietnam — provincial and district junior table tennis tournaments where clubs organise on their own because official competitions are too few. And I realised something: at those events, what a child remembers most is not the win, but the feeling of belonging to a team, a community, an arena. That is what keeps them in the sport longer than any medal.

The single point of failure

But there is a dark side to this model that I do not want to gloss over: dependence on a few individuals.

Matt Porter is Worthing TTC's head coach, and he initiated the event. That means if Porter transfers, retires, or simply loses his enthusiasm, the event may vanish. An event built on one person is an event with a structural weakness. In risk management, this is called a single point of failure.

This is not a criticism of Porter — on the contrary, his initiative is admirable. But it is a reminder that grassroots sport needs to be institutionalised, not merely personalised. A coach launching an event is a good start. But for that event to survive across generations of players, it needs a larger structure: an official calendar, a funding source, a group of organisers rather than one person.

There is one more point to raise. If the model of "clubs organise, the governing body sanctions" becomes the norm, might it conceal a more uncomfortable truth — that the national governing body lacks the resources to run lower-tier events itself? A co-production model can be an effective solution, or it can be a way of legitimising the transfer of burden from the state to clubs. The line between the two is fragile, and only time will answer.

Geography as a forgotten variable

What I find most interesting in this story is the appearance of Jersey and Guernsey. In sports analysis, people usually talk about level, tactics, talent. But geography — distance, travel cost, isolation — is often overlooked, even though it is one of the biggest barriers to grassroots sports development.

The two Channel Islands sit between England and France, with populations of a few tens of thousands each. For a junior player in Jersey, attending a national competition on the English mainland requires air or ferry tickets, accommodation, time, and money. It is a barrier a player in London never has to consider. An event they can access — smaller, less prestigious — is worth far more than a big event they cannot reach.

As someone in sport, I see in this small detail a lesson about geographic equity. When designing sports systems, we tend to focus on making the summit higher, forgetting to make the base wider. And widening the base sometimes begins with very simple questions: Where is the child? How far can they travel? What do they need to be at the starting line?

In Vietnamese table tennis, this question is worth asking too. A child in a remote province has far fewer competitive opportunities than a child in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. Geography in Vietnam, though different in scale, creates similar barriers. And those barriers cannot be solved simply by holding more tournaments in big cities.

A view from Vietnam

I cannot read this story without thinking of home. Vietnamese table tennis has a junior competition system with its own features — the national junior championship, regional tournaments, open events run by federations or clubs. But the structural question is the same: does the official system have enough room for every child who wants to compete?

The answer, from my observation, is no. In many provinces, a talented junior table tennis player has only a few tournaments a year to play. If they are not on the provincial team, opportunities are even fewer. Private clubs and community coaching classes often have to organise internal tournaments or friendlies so their students have somewhere to play. Those events are barely recognised in the official system, yet they host most of the actual competitive activity in junior table tennis.

What the Worthing model suggests is a direction: the national governing body can play the role of supporter rather than sole organiser, enabling clubs to initiate events, and creating a system that recognises those events as part of the development pathway. The solution is not complete. But it is a way to widen the arena without a huge budget — and when sporting resources are always limited, that is a direction worth considering.

What I want to emphasise is this: the development of a sport is not measured only by medal counts on the international stage, but also by how many children get the chance to play that sport seriously. If we focus only on producing a few outstanding talents, we are building a pyramid standing on a sharp tip rather than a solid base. And sporting history shows that the most sustainable systems are the ones with the widest base.

What remains after every tournament

"What remains after every tournament is not the scoreline, but the people who became the moment."

In Worthing, when 10 October arrives, children will walk into a competition hall with bats in hand and a little nervousness in their hearts. There will be matches no one watches but parents and coaches. There will be defeats and victories recorded on no national ranking table.

But for those children, those will be real matches. And that matters more than anything else.

The youth sports system is not built from stars. It is built from thousands of small clubs, thousands of volunteer coaches, thousands of events no one remembers by name. What happens in Worthing this October is one of those bricks.

"The hidden champion does not need the spotlight; they need someone patient enough to be willing to see them."

And sometimes, that patient person is a coach in a seaside town who asked a simple question on a late-summer afternoon: "What can we do for our boys?"