Worthing TTC launches 1 Star event: English youth table tennis patches the hole beneath the pyramid base

In Worthing, a coastal town in southern England, a decision is compressed into a few lines of an announcement. Worthing Table Tennis Club will host a junior team event labelled “1 Star”, to be held on Saturday 10 October. The format is stated plainly: two players per team, competing in a progressive knockout.

After years spent behind the scenes at hundreds of sporting events, I have a stubborn habit: never read a competition format as an administrative detail. A format is the answer to a larger question. It reveals what the organisers are trying to solve, and why the existing system cannot solve it.

The phrase “progressive knockout” is the first anchor point. In junior table tennis, a standard knockout carries one fatal flaw for a developing age group: lose once and you go home. A twelve-year-old travels three hours, loses in forty minutes, and the day ends there. For an elite player, that pressure is necessary. For a development programme, it is waste that cannot be justified.

A progressive knockout reverses that logic. Teams are not eliminated after one defeat but continue competing. Each child plays more matches, holds the bat more often, and collects more moments of celebration or of learning to lose with dignity. The organisers prioritised volume of experience over knockout drama. The smallest detail in an event-administration story often says the most about the health of a sport.

But the more interesting question lies elsewhere: why must a local club create its own arena?

To answer, one must understand the three-tier pyramid of English youth table tennis. At the top is the Youth British Clubs League, or YBCL — the national club team competition for the strongest clubs, played across concentrated weekends, with high travel costs and a requirement for full squads. Every junior club wants to reach this tier.

Below sit two lower tiers: JuniorBCL for the Junior age band and CadetBCL for the Cadet band. These are highly localised, with less travel, lower cost and a more flexible format. They act as stepping stones, keeping small and mid-sized clubs active year-round without being worn down by travel bills.

And then there is an unofficial third tier: events run by clubs themselves, with governing-body sanction, to fill the gap left by the official system.

Worthing TTC sits precisely in that gap. Head coach Matt Porter asks a blunt question: “What can we do for our boys and the other teams that haven’t got in?” Behind that question lies a harsh reality. Every season, there are junior teams good enough for team competition but unable to enter YBCL — through a shortage of places, a missed deadline, an insufficiently strong squad, or simply because they are too far away for reasonable travel.

From Jersey and Guernsey, two Channel Islands outside mainland Britain, the story is even clearer. Jersey’s boys’ team did not make it into YBCL this season. Lisa De Poerck of Jersey Table Tennis confirmed it. Their problem is not a lack of talent. Their problem is geography. A team in the English Channel must account for ferries, flights and accommodation every time it enters a national competition — figures that turn a team event into a financial burden rather than a sporting opportunity.

Worthing’s 1 Star event exists to answer exactly that kind of problem.

The first thing worth noting is the “1 Star” label. Within Table Tennis England’s domestic competition taxonomy, this is the lowest grade — an entry-level, development event. It carries no international ranking points, no prize money, and no selection value at any elite level. Precisely for that reason, it says the most important thing about a sport’s health: whether the base of the pyramid is thick enough.

A strong table tennis nation is measured by medals at the top, but also by the number of children with a team arena at the bottom. At the base of the pyramid, demand for team match-play far exceeds the supply the official system can deliver.

The two-player team format is a design choice worth analysing. In standard team table tennis, a team usually fields three players, sometimes more. But a three-player team requires a club to have at least three juniors of comparable standard in the same age band. For many small clubs, that is impossible. The two-player format lowers the participation threshold to a minimum while preserving the essence of team play: the two players must coordinate, share pressure, and cheer each other between games.

This detail shows the organisers understand their target precisely. They are not designing for strong clubs. They are designing for small and mid-sized clubs — places that may have only two children confident enough to step onto a team court.

Then comes the calendar. The event falls on 10 October. The JuniorBCL entry deadline is Wednesday 16 September. The CadetBCL deadline is Wednesday 28 October. Placed side by side, a pattern emerges: the 1 Star event sits exactly in between, after the JuniorBCL door has closed but before the CadetBCL door shuts.

Behind that coincidence lies a calculation. It captures the group of teams that have missed the JuniorBCL deadline, have not yet settled CadetBCL, and need more team matches to keep their rhythm. Without this event, those teams would drift for weeks with no meaningful team match at all.

The governance model behind the event also deserves scrutiny. Table Tennis England, through its events team and a support programme abbreviated TAP, backed the initiative. The two names mentioned are Neil Rogers and John Mackey. The club acknowledged that support with a public thank-you.

Here, the governing body’s role is enabling rather than directing. The club originates the idea, chooses the format, sets the date, and invites partner teams. The national body approves, supports and attaches an official label. This is a co-production model — central and local working together. Its advantage is clear: low central cost, high local ownership. The organiser is the person who best understands local need.

The turnaround from initial idea to a scheduled event was described as very quick. That suggests the sanctioning process for sub-elite events in England is light on bureaucracy. This is a real competitive advantage. In many countries, a club wanting to run an entry-level event must navigate months of paperwork. Here, a coach with relationships and standing can turn an idea into an event in a short time.

The participation of Jersey and Guernsey brings a notable geographic signal. These are teams from two islands outside mainland England. Their willingness to travel to a small event in Worthing shows the model’s core value: it solves a geography problem. A local event can attract distant teams because it does not require them to compete nationally at enormous travel cost. They come to play team table tennis, to accumulate matches, and to keep their juniors motivated to train.

From my own observation post, this is the kind of event I have witnessed in many countries across more than twenty years of following table tennis and track-and-field sports. At a small team competition, I once stood beside a mother whose son lost all three of his matches in a single morning. The boy was eleven, his face red with shame. But in the final match, he still walked out with his bat, still served, still shouted when he scored. Under a conventional knockout, that boy would have gone home after the first match. Instead, he learned the most important lesson team sport can teach: how to continue after defeat.

And if we look at the wider picture, a harder question emerges. Why must a supplementary event like this be initiated by a club, rather than placed on the official calendar by the central governing body?

This is the contradiction worth thinking about. On the surface, a club proactively creating an event is a positive signal of local initiative. Looked at more deeply, it is also a sign that the official system lacks the capacity to cover the base of the pyramid. Had JuniorBCL and CadetBCL met demand, no team would be waiting for a 1 Star event to get a team match. Teams cut from YBCL do not disappear; they simply look for a wider field elsewhere.

In other words, the co-production model may be masking a capacity shortfall. Here, the support does not come from a central budget or the official competition system, but from the goodwill of a few committed individuals. Thanks to Matt Porter’s agility, the light-touch governance proves effective. But the model is also fragile: it depends on specific people. If Matt Porter changed jobs, or the club shifted direction, the event could vanish after a single staging.

Another risk is sustainability. The club expressed a hope that the event would become a fixed part of the junior calendar. But a hope is not a commitment. To become an annual fixture, it needs more than one successful staging. It needs formal calendarisation, a steady entry field, and organising resources sustained over years. Those can only be confirmed after the first event closes and is evaluated.

One more point deserves consideration: competitive value. An event with no ranking points, no selection value and no prize money can easily be dismissed as second-tier by parents and juniors. Without enough entries, the event loses the competitive edge it needs to motivate players. With too many, the organisers are overwhelmed. This is a difficult balance, especially for a brand-new event.

But there is another way to see it, and I believe this is the real point. Junior team table tennis, in any country, always faces a paradox. At the elite level, individual achievement is celebrated — one strong player can carry a whole team. At the grassroots level, it is team spirit that keeps children attached to the sport long term. Events like 1 Star do not create champions. They create training habits. And in a sport that demands thousands of hours of practice to reach a high level, habit is the most valuable asset of all.

I have written before that clubs and federations should view an injured or drop-out junior the way they view a transfer contract about to be rewritten. Here, the same logic applies. Every child who leaves the sport for lack of an arena is an irrecoverable loss. Worthing’s event, small as it is, is trying to keep those children in.

Placed side by side, Worthing TTC’s 1 Star event and the YBCL system show two very different levels of competition within a single ecosystem. At the top, competition is for position. At the base, competition is for retention. Two different problems demand two different tools. And the tool for retention is rarely born in a central boardroom — it usually comes from a coach standing in a gymnasium, looking around, and asking what he can do.

What struck me most was Matt Porter’s question. It was not a question about results. It was not a question about a place at a major event. It was a structural question: where do the teams that cannot get into the system go? His answer — building an event himself — is more pragmatic than strategic. But in grassroots sport, pragmatism is sometimes more effective than strategy. An event with no points can say more than an entire ranking table.

Viewed against Vietnamese table tennis, where junior team events remain few and concentrated in major cities, this story is clearly instructive. A junior team in a distant province wanting team match-play must often travel hundreds of kilometres, with costs borne by families. That is exactly the kind of problem Worthing’s 1 Star event seeks to solve: reduce the geographic burden, increase the number of matches, and keep juniors from leaving the sport for lack of competitive opportunity.

As someone who has hosted many table tennis events, I see the real value of this event lying not in its scale. It lies in its organising principle: a minimal format, minimal cost, a design that maximises matches, and a coach willing to take responsibility. These three elements can be replicated in any country with junior table tennis.

One question remains unanswered. Will events like this become a formal tier in the system, or remain a temporary fix for gaps the governing body has not closed? The answer will come from two figures: how many teams enter the first edition, and how many times the event recurs in next season’s calendar. If it happens only once, it is a nice story. If it becomes a replicated model, it is a structural change.

In Worthing on 10 October, a group of children will walk into a gymnasium in two-player teams. They will play more matches than a conventional knockout would allow. Perhaps none of them will become a national champion. But if this model keeps spreading, in a few years some players will say that it was exactly these small events that kept them in table tennis. That is how a sport is built from the bottom up, not from the top down.