Worthing TTC launches a Junior Team '1 Star' event: The gap at the base of England's table tennis pyramid

Late afternoon in Worthing, a seaside town in Sussex, England, Matt Porter sits in the hall after the day's final session. He is head coach of Worthing Table Tennis Club. Last season his junior side won its division. But when the entry list for the Youth British Clubs League — England's premier national youth team competition — closed, another group of local children had no place. Porter sat with a question I believe thousands of grassroots coaches worldwide have silently asked themselves: where do the kids who don't get into the national league play?

His answer was not a petition to the federation. It was a tournament. On Saturday 10 October, Worthing TTC launches a junior team event labelled "1 Star," where two-player teams compete in a progressive knockout format. Losing one match does not mean going home. Teams keep playing, keep touching the ball, keep being part of the day.

This small event must be placed in its proper geological layer. English youth table tennis runs on a three-tier pyramid. At the top is the YouthBCL — where the strongest teams meet on national weekends at high travel cost. The middle tier is the JuniorBCL and CadetBCL — more localised, less travel, lower cost, flexible format. The JuniorBCL entry deadline falls on Wednesday 16 September; the CadetBCL accepts entries until Wednesday 28 October. And at the bottom, until now, there has been a gap. Worthing's "1 Star" event was born to fill that gap.

Across nearly four decades working in player development and watching grassroots competitions in many countries, I have learned one thing: the notable part of the Worthing story is not its size. It is that the event was created from the bottom up, not the top down. Porter did not wait for the federation to open another tier. He opened it himself. And he did not open it for himself alone. The entry list includes Worthing, but also Jersey and Guernsey — two islands in the Channel Islands, outside mainland England.

Lisa De Poerck, representing Jersey Table Tennis, said plainly what the national competition structure reveals: Jersey's boys' team did not make it into the YouthBCL this year. For them, the barrier was not really standard of play. The barrier was geography — a trip from the island to the mainland for a national weekend is a serious cost and logistics problem for a small club.

This is the point I want to press home. The gap the "1 Star" event fills is not a gap in talent, but a gap in team-competition infrastructure for communities pushed to the margins by geography and cost. A localised event solves exactly that problem: it brings the competition closer, lowers the threshold for entry, and turns "being allowed to compete" into an ordinary thing rather than a privilege of wealthy, densely populated regions.

The format tells its own story. Two-player teams, progressive knockout. One defeat does not end the tournament. For an eleven- or twelve-year-old just getting used to team pressure, the guarantee of more matches matters more than winning or losing. At the development level, minutes played are the real currency. The organisers chose to maximise matches rather than maximise knockout drama — a choice that is more educational than commercial, and I read it as the mark of people who understand the psychology of young children.

There is a technical dimension I always weigh when discussing youth table tennis. Singles teaches a child to take responsibility for every point. But doubles and team play teach something else entirely: how to read the rhythm of the person beside you, how to yield a shot, how to shout encouragement after a teammate loses a point. Those skills never appear on a scoresheet. They form only when a child is placed in a real situation, in a real match, against a real opponent. A six-hour training session cannot replace an afternoon of competition.

It must also be said plainly, though the youth-development world often hesitates to say it. Pushing young children into a dense competition rhythm too early carries a cost. Bodies are not fully developed, technique is still raw, and when the calendar is compressed, injury and psychological burnout are hard to avoid. A progressive knockout format relieves some of that pressure, because it does not force a child to play every match as if the whole season depended on it. But the tension remains on the shoulders of the organisers, who must balance giving children more competition with protecting them from adults' own enthusiasm.

Behind the event is a governance model I find worth analysing. Worthing TTC initiated it, but Table Tennis England — through its events team and a support body abbreviated as TAP — stood behind it to legitimise and back it. Neil Rogers and John Mackey are the two names that appear in the acknowledgements. Porter mentions a quick turnaround from initial idea to scheduled event. This is a co-production model: the federation gives the green light and provides the framework, the club does the heavy lifting. Central cost is low, local ownership is high.

But that very smoothness exposes a blind spot. When an event exists only thanks to a few committed individuals and a light-touch approval process, it depends on people rather than on the system. Matt Porter may stand up to organise it this year. Will someone stand up next year, if he moves away or burns out? An event that is not formally written into the annual calendar tends to fade quietly. This is the familiar paradox of every grassroots growth model: flexible early, fragile later.

One more thing must be faced squarely. The fact that a club has to create its own event so its children have somewhere to play as a team exposes a reality rarely spoken of: the supply of lower-tier competitions in England is capacity-constrained. The federation cannot provide enough playing fields for every level group. When that gap is filled by voluntary initiative, it is both a solution and a signal. The solution is that children have somewhere to play. The signal is that the official system has not finished its share of the work.

Worthing TTC describes a commitment to developing junior players both on and off the table. That phrase "off the table" matters. It shows the organisers aim not only at ball-striking skill, but at what a child learns as part of a collective: cooperation, restraint, rising after defeat, cheering for the person beside you. Those are lessons singles cannot teach, and they are also why events like this deserve to be viewed more seriously than a small grassroots news item.

I still remember the evenings spent taking notes at the edge of junior tournaments in Osaka, in Saitama, and back home in Vietnam. Every generation of players is a geological layer; I scrape away the dust of time to read their youth. And what I have learned across so many layers of sediment is this: the true health of a table tennis nation is not measured by medals at the peak, but by the number of places still open to play at the base. A "1 Star" event with a few teams will not make international news. But it is a seed. And a seed does not need noise to sprout — it needs soil, and a winter patient enough to wait.

The wider picture remains open. This is the event's first staging. Three teams from three places have confirmed participation. Everything after 10 October is still an open question: will it run smoothly, will the teams be satisfied, and most importantly, will it return next season? The organisers express the hope that it becomes an annual fixture in the junior calendar. That hope is sincere, but unproven.

What I want to leave at the end of this piece is not praise for a small tournament, nor a warning. It is a methodological observation. When a sport grows to the point where the official pyramid no longer has room for every child who wants to play as a team, the next stage of growth will come from the grassroots, not from the meeting room. What rises from the ground lasts longer than what is scattered from above. And if the Worthing model repeats across ten or twenty other English clubs, what is created is no longer a tournament — it is a new geological layer in a nation's youth table tennis.