Worthing TTC Launches the Junior Team 1 Star: The Gap at the Base of England's Youth Table Tennis Pyramid

On a late September evening, Matt Porter — head coach of Worthing Table Tennis Club, a small club on England's south coast — stayed behind after the junior session and asked a question I have heard many times across eleven years of watching youth academies: "What can we do for our boys, and for the other teams that haven't got in?" The question is not new. The answer is. On Saturday 10 October, Worthing TTC will stage a new team event called the Junior Team 1 Star, aimed at junior players below the Youth British Clubs League tier. I am not writing about a tournament. I am writing about the hole that tournament is trying to fill. Back home in Vietnam, when a youth event is announced, the first reflex is usually to ask who will win, whether national-team players are involved, whether there is prize money. In Worthing, the first question was where children who have never had a team competition would go. Those are different starting points, and they say a great deal about how youth table tennis is organised. To understand why an event like the Junior Team 1 Star is necessary, you have to understand how England's youth table tennis is layered. At the top sits the Youth British Clubs League, known as the YBCL. This is the strongest club-level youth team competition, played on national weekends and gathering clubs with squad depth and travel budgets. To enter the YBCL, a club must pass a selection gate. And like every selection gate, it has those who get in and those left outside. Below the YBCL are the JuniorBCL and CadetBCL. These are more localised competitions, split into Junior and Cadet age bands, with less travel, lower cost and a more flexible format. The JuniorBCL entry deadline falls on Wednesday 16 September, while the CadetBCL closes later, on Wednesday 28 October. At the very bottom — the layer I believe few people bother to dig into — is a gap. Youth teams not strong enough for the YBCL, or too geographically remote to take part, or simply too late to enter, end up with no team competition at all for the whole season. They still train. They still improve. But they have no matches. Last season, Worthing TTC's youth team won its division. Porter told me that once the season ended, the question facing the coaching staff was a simple one: what do we do next. Jersey and Guernsey — two islands in the English Channel, outside mainland Britain — sent teams. Jersey did not make it into the YBCL this year, and its boys' team missed the cut. Guernsey did not either. For them, the issue was not so much ability as geography and logistics. That is where the name "1 Star" comes in. Within Table Tennis England's event taxonomy, "1 Star" marks a lower-tier event — an entry and development level. I have not found the formal definition of this label in the source material, so I note it as an organising grade, not a performance grade. The format is the first thing worth discussing. Teams compete in pairs, in a progressive knockout — meaning that losing once does not mean going home. A team keeps playing, keeps getting more matches, keeps getting more exposure until the event closes. To someone used to traditional single-elimination brackets, this looks like a concession. To me, it is a deliberate design choice: maximising playing minutes for each child rather than maximising knockout drama. At ages below Cadet and Junior level, what these children need is not a title. What they need are real matches, with parents watching, with the pressure of serving at a decisive point, with the sense that a team-mate is standing beside them and that they are accountable to one another. I have spent years taking notes at youth academies, and what I have learned is this: a child who plays ten team matches in a season develops psychologically faster than a child who trains for ten months without a single match. Based on my experience of following matches, the difference does not lie in technique. It lies in the ability to endure the silence between points, when a team-mate looks at you and nobody says anything. The timing is another overlooked detail. The event takes place on 10 October. The JuniorBCL deadline closes on 16 September. The CadetBCL entry window runs until 28 October. That places the "1 Star" event neatly in the gap between two registration windows — after one door has shut and before the other opens wide enough. Nobody schedules a tournament in such a gap by accident. It is placed there to catch teams that have just missed out, just been excluded, or just realised they have no fixtures for the season. Then there is the delivery model. This event was not commissioned top-down by Table Tennis England. It was initiated by a club. The national body plays a supporting, sanctioning and facilitating role. In the source material, the individuals named are Neil Rogers and John Mackey of Table Tennis England, alongside a unit abbreviated as TAP whose full expansion I have not been able to confirm in the original text — for now, I take it to be a federation support body or programme. Porter and Lisa De Poerck of Jersey Table Tennis both thanked these individuals for supporting the idea from its earliest stage until the event had an official date. This model has a name in governance literature: co-production. The federation does not fund and run everything itself. The local club steps up, bringing knowledge of people, of venues, of specific children. The federation supplies what the club lacks: legitimacy, a ranking system and cross-regional connection. Central cost falls. Local ownership rises. This is a model proven across many amateur sports, and it suits a fixed-equipment sport like table tennis particularly well. I see something familiar to me in this small story. Years ago, as a first-year sports science student interning at a youth academy, I wrote a long report on a small midfielder whom the coaching staff had overlooked. I had to resend it several times, with specific numbers attached, before anyone looked again. The lesson from that year is exactly the lesson from Worthing: large systems often fail to see small pieces until someone stoops to pick them up. The deepest layer usually tells the truest story, but few people are willing to go down there with me. The truth here is that the base of England's youth table tennis pyramid does not fill itself. It needs a coach to stay behind after training and ask a question that sounds naive. But if I stopped there, I would have written a eulogy. That is not my job. A club-initiated event filling a space the official system leaves open is a positive signal on the surface. Dug deeper, it is an indirect confession of the limited capacity of the governing body at the grassroots level. If the federation had the resources to run a team competition system spanning every age band and every region, a coach in Worthing would not have had to do it himself. His stepping up does not deny the value of the act. It exposes the limits of the structure behind it. The second risk, and the biggest, is sustainability. This event depends on a few committed individuals and on the goodwill of the federation. Both are variables that can change. Porter could change jobs. The federation contact could move departments. Support funding could be cut when priorities shift. If that happens, the gap at the base of the pyramid reopens, and this time there is nobody left to ask that naive question. The third risk is subtler: an event at the "1 Star" level keeps children in the sport, but it does not automatically create a pathway to the top. There is a distance between retention and talent development. A child playing ten team matches at entry level grows socially, but without a route connecting upward to higher tiers, they may still stop at fifteen because they see nothing ahead. A play space is a necessary condition. A pathway is a sufficient one. There is one more point I want to make plainly, even if it is not easy to hear. Stories like this are often told as proof of the vitality of the grassroots movement. I do not deny that vitality. But I have seen too many times how grassroots stories are used to mask a lack of systemic investment. When a community looks after itself, people easily forget that someone should have been looking after it first. The fact that Jersey and Guernsey must cross the Channel to get matches should not be viewed as a charming quirk of the event. It is a marker of the geographical distance the system has not resolved. I do not go looking for stars — I go looking for how people light those stars. In Worthing, the flame is being lit by the two hands of a local coach and a grant from the federation. That flame may warm an entire winter, or gutter out when one of those hands withdraws. What is worth considering for Vietnamese youth table tennis is not whether we should copy a "1 Star" event. It is the question of what the base of our own pyramid looks like, and who is standing there. Across the provinces, there is no shortage of small clubs, of coaches single-handedly managing a dozen children, of parents driving their kids to training every evening without knowing where their child will compete next year. Our national youth competition calendar has clear milestones, but between those milestones lie long silences, and children do not grow up inside silences. If I have learned one thing from watching academies, it is this: a youth academy does not produce athletes — it keeps the unfinished manuscripts of a generation. Every team event at a lower tier is a page allowed to be written. Every season without a single match is a page left blank, and a child who never knows what they lost. Dust covering memory is not there to bury it, but so that we dig it up at the right moment. The Worthing story is a small shard of pottery lying exposed on the surface, visible without digging. What is worth asking is how many similar shards are still under the dust, in places where nobody stays behind after training to ask a naive question. On Saturday 10 October, at a seaside club in England, a few dozen children will walk to the table wearing a team shirt — the first time this season. None of them will become a world champion because of one October day. But a few will remember that day for twenty years, and will tell their own children about the first time they did not hit the ball alone. A small event at the lowest tier of a large system does not change English table tennis. It changes how I read the gaps in any youth development system — including the one I live and work inside. If you run a small club in Vietnam and wonder whether your work matters, remember that sometimes the greatest value is not in producing champions, but in keeping the base of the pyramid from hollowing out season after season. The question I leave for myself, and for anyone who cares about Vietnamese youth table tennis: how many Matt Porters do we have, and what are we doing so that the next one does not have to fill the gap alone?