18 DiSE Places: England Widens the Base, But Nobody Has Proved the Peak

I sat in Shenzhen, August rain tapping the window, and on the screen was a press release with no score, no highlight, not a single topspin. Table Tennis England had just announced its DiSE intake for the 2026–28 cycle: eighteen new faces, bringing the programme total to thirty-six athletes. Four names were cited — Bly Twomey, a Paralympic medallist; Abraham Sellado, Kacper Piwowar and Adam Alibhai, three players who have worn England colours at the European Youth Championships.

Most readers will nod and scroll on. I saw a gap. "More and more players are being given the opportunity" — that is the line Paul Johnson, the DiSE programme lead, used in the release. It is an argument about quantity. Thirty-nine years of covering table tennis taught me one reflex: when a sport boasts about places, ask about conversion rates.

DiSE is not a table tennis academy

DiSE — the Diploma in Sporting Excellence — is a qualification peculiar to the British sports system. It blends academic study with high-performance training, but it does not operate like a traditional table tennis academy. Athletes keep training at their clubs, keep competing on the WTT circuit, and in parallel accumulate a national qualification with UCAS points for university admission.

Structurally it runs on four tiers: Sport England funds it, SportsAid allocates the places, Table Tennis England selects, and SGS College awards the diploma. None of those four tiers is a purely table tennis tier. This is the architecture of a sport that treats the athlete as a citizen with two lives rather than a machine that only knows how to score.

Programme content includes five camps per academic year, one international camp between Years 1 and 2, and the possibility of international competition in Year 2. Alongside that sit off-table modules: anti-doping, nutrition, lifestyle, "cultures, values and behaviours". Graduates also pick up a Coaching Assistant qualification and a first-aid certificate.

Looking at that structure, I understand why England chose this road. England is the sport's homeland — the ITTF was founded in 2026 with its headquarters in London — but its elite competitive standing slipped away long ago. For a nation at the participation tier rather than the dominance tier, widening the base is more rational than chasing world medals. Rational, but not necessarily effective.

Two tracks in one list

The first notable detail: the four named athletes do not share an ecosystem. Bly Twomey is a Paralympic medallist — she competes inside the para classification system, a ranking and competition structure entirely separate from the able-bodied WTT tour. The other three are able-bodied juniors.

Placing those two groups side by side in one release is a communications choice, not a sporting one. It carries inclusion value and signalling value for funders. It also makes peer comparison meaningless: a Paralympic medal and a European Youth Championships appearance do not measure with the same ruler.

That matters more than it looks. Para table tennis is the segment least shaped by China's concentrated dominance in the way the able-bodied tour is. For a mid-tier national federation, that is territory where investment can produce real results. Twomey appearing among the four named athletes is a quiet signal that London understands this.

Fifteen, eighteen, thirty-six

The second detail: scale. The programme originally took fifteen athletes, then added three more, and this new intake is eighteen places, taking the total to thirty-six. That is a capacity signal. It is not a quality signal.

I stress this because it is the easiest thing to miss. More places is an administrative event — it can be measured in paperwork. A higher conversion rate from junior pathway to national team is a sporting event — it can only be measured in results, and it takes years. A release about study places cannot measure the second thing.

This story reminds me of a morning during the Covid season, when tournaments were played in empty arenas. The empty stadium taught me that noise is not football. The same applies here: a place count is not an achievement. It is just the noise of a process running.

The word Interim nobody noticed

The third detail, and the one I keep coming back to: the title Head of Pathway is listed with the word Interim attached. Leadership of the pathway is currently an acting appointment.

Natalie Green, who holds the role, is quoted saying the programme will strengthen the pathway. But a pathway that doubles in size while its navigator has not been permanently appointed is a structure with a soft spot. In sports governance, the word interim usually brings two consequences: long-term strategy gets postponed, and subordinate staffing decisions get frozen. For a programme that has just increased its intake, that is a mismatch between the speed of expansion and the speed of institutional anchoring.

What a list does not say

UCAS points are an attractive part of DiSE — but they are also a filter. They steer the programme towards young athletes with university ambitions. That group is large, but it is not the entire talent pool. Kids at clubs in England's industrial north, the ones with no appetite for a university route, may fall outside that net.

Let me say it plainly: the dual-career model is progress in terms of athlete welfare. If it becomes the only door into the development pathway, it can narrow recruitment rather than widen it.

A view from Shenzhen

I live a few kilometres from Chinese table tennis academies. I have watched how the system here works: selection from age six, six hours of training a day, progressive culling at each tier, and an enormous net with hundreds of thousands of children at the bottom. Nobody there talks about UCAS points. There, people talk about gold medals.

Comparing the two models shows they are not solving the same problem. China optimises the peak by sacrificing a great deal at the base. England optimises the base by accepting a lower peak. Both are choices, but only one of the two has produced world champions in this sport over the past three decades.

That does not make the English model wrong. It only means that if London wants Chinese-style results, it is using the wrong tool. And if it wants English-style results — a sustainable table tennis culture, more players, more coaches — then the measure of success has to change. Place counts cannot measure that goal. The number of people still playing at forty can.

The contrarian angle: widening the base may be a strategic retreat

Here I break from the crowd.

The common read is: England increased places, England is investing, England is advancing. The reverse read is: when a federation increases places with no evidence of output, that is usually a response to institutional pressure rather than the product of a long-term plan.

Look at the timeline. This DiSE cycle runs 2026–28, sitting entirely inside the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic cycle. But an Olympic cycle is four years, and a fourteen-year-old today will be eighteen in 2030. If the real target is LA 2028, recruiting in 2026 is too late for a medal and too early for a serious trajectory.

Which means the "record" claim is serving a different purpose: proving to funders that the money is being used correctly. Places are allocated by SportsAid on the basis of Sport England resources — and that is a decision reversible at any time. The whole expansion stands on somebody else's budget decision. DiSE does not fund itself.

I could be wrong. If in four or five years a few names from this list appear in England squads at European or world level, then the 2026–28 cycle will be read back as the start of a wave. To assess that, the federation must publish alumni tracking data on DiSE graduates. Until then, all we have is a list.

What to watch

I am old, but I am fast enough to understand that the slow-footed disappear. English table tennis is not slow-footed — it is expanding. But expanding without measuring is just movement.

Three indicators to track. First, whether place numbers in coming cycles hold at thirty-six or fall back to fifteen. Second, whether the Head of Pathway title loses the word Interim. Third, how many DiSE alumni reach national junior squads within three years.

And one more thing, small but valuable. The Coaching Assistant qualification the programme awards may be the most valuable output in the entire package. An athlete who never reaches the peak can still stand beside the table as a coach. If English table tennis is replicating its coaching workforce while expanding its athlete pool, that is the thing worth watching over the next decade.

Nobody calls me a traitor anymore. They call me the one who arrived first. But arriving first only means something if someone follows.

A sport does not die from a lack of talent. It dies because nobody counts where the talent went.