Worthing TTC Launches the Junior Team 1 Star Event: When a Club Fills the Gap at the Base of England's Table Tennis Pyramid

In a school sports hall in Worthing, a coastal town in southern England, there is a small detail I have seen at almost every youth table tennis venue in the world: a towel folded in quarters resting on the edge of the table, a freshly glued bat, and two children standing beside each other rather than opposite each other. Team format. Without it, youth table tennis is just a sequence of solitary matches, each child alone with his own defeat.

On Saturday 10 October, Worthing Table Tennis Club will stage a junior team event called Junior Team 1 Star. Two-player teams. A progressive knockout format, meaning that losing one match does not mean going home. Entries have been received from Worthing, Jersey and Guernsey. Those three names, two of which lie outside mainland England, say a great deal about why the event exists.

It began with a question from Matt Porter, Worthing's head coach: “What can we do for our boys and the other teams that haven't got in?” That is a question anyone who has ever stood in the corridor of a youth tournament should ask themselves. Porter did not ask how to make his own team stronger. He asked how to create more matches for children who had not yet found a place.

I have sat in enough of those stands to know that the most valuable moment of a youth event is rarely the final. It is the third match of a team that has already lost two, when two eleven-year-olds are still standing side by side, still high-fiving, still believing the morning is not over. In 2026, hosting the broadcast of the Table Tennis World Cup, I remember telling my team that this sport sells one-against-one rallies to the audience, but it grows players through sessions with teammates. Thirteen years later, I hold the same view.

Based on my experience of watching matches, from provincial halls in Vietnam to international arenas, the absence of team formats is the quietest hole in the talent systems of almost every country. It does not knock anyone down immediately. It simply makes slower-developing children leave the sport two years earlier than they should have.

To understand why Worthing's event matters, look at the structure of English youth table tennis. At the top sits the YouthBCL, the strongest national youth club team competition, played on national weekends with heavy travel and high cost, open only to clubs with enough depth and enough money. Below it are the JuniorBCL and CadetBCL, split by age band, more localised, with less travel, lower cost and a more flexible format. The JuniorBCL entry deadline is Wednesday 16 September. The CadetBCL entry deadline is Wednesday 28 October.

Below all three tiers is a void. Not a void of ability, but a void of opportunity. Teams not strong enough for the YouthBCL, or strong enough but too late, or simply too far away to travel every weekend, have no team competition of their own. They have individual events. They have training. They do not have the experience of standing inside a team and competing as a team.

That is why the Junior Team 1 Star exists: it is not a new event inside the system, but a piece a club placed by hand into the system's hollow. The “1 Star” label sits at the lower end of Table Tennis England's domestic event taxonomy, denoting entry level and development rather than performance tier. The precise definition of the label is not stated in the original announcement, so I treat it only as a marker of level.

Two-player teams are a notable technical choice. A small club in a coastal town can rarely field three or four players of comparable standard for a full team match. Two is the minimum number that can honestly be called a team, and the maximum a small development group can keep stable. The format is designed for exactly the units the YouthBCL leaves behind.

The progressive knockout deserves even closer attention. In a normal knockout, a first-round loser goes home with one match in hand. In a progressive knockout, that team keeps playing, keeps finding opponents, keeps getting another match. The organisers stated the purpose plainly: to ensure teams continue competing rather than being eliminated early. This is a conscious trade: drama is sacrificed for touches of the ball. For a twelve-year-old, three matches mean far more than one match and an afternoon on the bench.

One detail about timing strikes me as the most important in the whole story. The event falls after the JuniorBCL deadline of 16 September and before the CadetBCL deadline of 28 October. It sits precisely in the window where teams have just discovered they missed the JuniorBCL but are not yet eligible for the CadetBCL — a gap in the autumn calendar that would otherwise pass with no team match at all. That is the kind of calculation only someone inside the system would make, and it shows the organisers understand the demand they are serving.

The presence of Jersey and Guernsey tells a different story, one about geography rather than performance. Jersey's boys' team did not make it into the YouthBCL this year, as Lisa De Poerck of Jersey Table Tennis confirmed. For an island in the Channel, missing the national league effectively means no team competition is logistically viable. For Jersey and Guernsey the barrier is distance, not standard — and a localised event removes that barrier in a single morning.

Operationally, this is a co-production between governing body and club. Table Tennis England's Events Team, along with TAP, supported the event, with Neil Rogers and John Mackey named as contacts. The organisers stressed the quick turnaround from initial idea to scheduled date. The advantage is clear: low central cost, high local ownership, and a faster decision cycle than a top-down standardised process.

Worthing is no beginner club. Its team won its division last season, and the club speaks of a wider commitment to developing junior players “both on and off the table”. That phrasing matters more to me than any result. It suggests people are thinking about keeping a child in the sport through life skills, not only through medals.

Looking at Vietnam, I see a gap of similar shape, differing only in scale. Between the national youth championship and the provincial club network, team formats essentially vanish after the youngest age bands. Strong teams cluster in a few big centres. Children far away must choose between costly travel and staying home. Nobody intends this. It is simply the consequence of designing competitions around the needs of the top tier.

In terms of industry transmission, this is a small but clean data point. Demand for junior team match-play below the YouthBCL standard exceeds what the official tiers absorb. A club spotted it before the governing body did, and acted. Scaled up, the greatest value would not be a handful of extra events but a higher retention rate — turning isolated individuals into people who once had teammates, and people who once had teammates quit less often.

Here I must say what not everyone in the industry wants to hear. Sport devotes almost all its attention to championships, where medals, broadcast and sponsorship live. But the true health indicator of a sport sits in a Saturday morning with five teams, three locations, a few dozen parents and one volunteer coach acting as organiser. If that indicator worsens, every medal above is merely a matter of the past.

The second worry is subtler. The club-led model is efficient in the short term, but it can mask a capacity shortfall at governing-body level. When filling the gap depends on the goodwill of a few specific individuals, the system has a single point of failure. Matt Porter changes jobs, Lisa De Poerck steps back from organising, or simply a busier season arrives, and the event can disappear before anyone notices it existed. The answer is calendarisation, not goodwill alone.

There is one more paradox in the format. Table tennis sells elimination to the audience — winners advance, losers stop. But a twelve-year-old learns more from a sixtieth touch of the day than from a first-round exit. The progressive knockout removes the drama the media needs and returns the repetition the learner needs. That is why it almost never appears at elite level, and almost always appears at development level.

The hidden champion does not need a spotlight; he needs someone patient enough to look. On 10 October in Worthing there will be no spotlight, no televised scoreboard, nobody calling out a champion's name. There will only be a few children playing more matches than the default process would ever have given them. Perhaps in twenty years, one of them will rewrite how their country runs junior events. By then, nobody will remember 10 October. That is entirely fine.

After 55 years of watching the world through a lens, I have learned that every sport is only a story about people, differing only in the arena. And the story in Worthing, Jersey and Guernsey this month is not about ball speed, rubbers or rankings. It is about a coach who sat down, wrote an email and asked something better for the teams that did not get in. If I take one question home to Saigon, it is this: if a coastal English club can do this in a few weeks, what stops us from doing the same here, next season? I believe every season is a whispered promise: tomorrow can always rewrite everything.