Worthing TTC launches a 1 Star junior event: the gap sitting at the base of the pyramid

On 10 October, a junior table tennis event carrying the “1 Star” label will begin in Worthing, a seaside town in the south of England. The format was settled before the first ball bounced: two-player teams in a progressive knockout — lose one match and the team still has a way to stay on the floor. The entry list at the time of publication contained exactly three names: Worthing Table Tennis Club, Jersey and Guernsey. Three contingents. One day. No world ranking points, no prize money mentioned, no player named in the announcement.

For an ordinary sports bulletin, that data would not fill a single line. But I have sat long enough in small halls to know that the smallest tournaments often speak loudest about the health of an entire sport. Worthing is such a case.

Context: three tiers of a pyramid

English junior table tennis runs on a fairly clear layered structure. At the top sits the YouthBCL — the national junior club team competition, gathering the strongest teams, played across weekends around the country, with travel and logistics costs that are far from trivial. One rung down are the JuniorBCL and CadetBCL — age-band competitions that are more local, involve shorter journeys, cost less and use more flexible formats. The base of the pyramid has long been a void: junior teams that do not qualify for any tier above.

This is where the Worthing story becomes worth reading. Head coach Matt Porter framed the problem with a very direct question: what can we do for our boys and the other teams that haven’t got in? The answer was an event run by the club itself, backed by Table Tennis England and a support group known by the acronym TAP, with two named contacts, Neil Rogers and John Mackey.

The calendar tells its own story. The JuniorBCL entry deadline fell on Wednesday 16 September. The CadetBCL deadline is Wednesday 28 October. The playing date of 10 October sits neatly between those two markers — after one door closes and before a second opens. Organisationally, that is a calculated landing point, not a fine day picked at random.

At 47, my desk told me to write what readers wanted. I started writing what they needed. And what table tennis readers need here is not an event notice but an answer to a larger question: how does a sport operate when demand outgrows its official framework?

Analysis: format, gap and the co-production model

What stands out most in the competition design is the progressive knockout. In junior team table tennis, eliminating a team after its first defeat can mean that team plays exactly one match and goes home. For a club that has to hire a minibus, get parental consent and organise an entire Saturday, the ratio of matches returned per hour invested is the decisive variable. The progressive format inverts the logic of a professional tournament: it optimises not for knockout drama but for the child’s actual minutes of play.

That is a philosophical choice. A professional event is designed to find a champion as quickly as possible. A development event is designed to ensure nobody goes home feeling they wasted a day. At the base of the pyramid, what accumulates is not ranking points but competitive experience.

Second is the cross-border element. Jersey and Guernsey are Channel Islands, outside mainland England. Their presence on the entry list is not a romantic detail about sporting friendship. It is a purely geographical signal. An island team wanting to play in the YouthBCL must solve the problem of sea crossings for an entire season. When that problem has no solution, the rational choice is to find something closer, shorter and cheaper. Lisa De Poerck of Jersey Table Tennis confirmed her boys’ team did not make it into the YBCL this year. Worthing’s event appeared exactly in that void.

Third, and perhaps most important in governance terms, is the co-production model. A local club devised the idea, built the format, fixed the date, then asked the national association to give it a green light and support. Table Tennis England did not order a new tier into existence; it permitted and stood behind one. Central cost is low, local ownership is high, and the rollout is fast. The organisers themselves mentioned the quick turnaround from initial idea to scheduled event.

My experience watching matches at junior events shows a fairly stable rule: the initiatives that last longest are usually not the best-designed ones, but the ones designed by people under direct pressure. Porter did not build a tier because of a federation’s long-term strategy. He built it because there were specific children in front of him and a specific question in his head.

Worthing is not a naive club. They won their division last season. And their messaging stresses a commitment to developing junior players both on and off the table — familiar language from community programmes, where the goal extends beyond the ball to life skills.

One thing should be stated plainly about value: judged purely as elite performance, this event is close to zero. No ITTF points, no WTT points, no international qualification, no player under evaluation. But measured by the yardstick of the development tier, that value is moderate and could grow over time. The difference between those two measurements is the whole content of this story.

I once saw Levi shake on a big stage. That shake made a legend. But what Worthing is doing is preparing children for the chance to shake for the first time — in a small hall, before a few dozen spectators, in a match nobody but their parents will remember. Without that first shake at that level, there is no memorable shake at the level above.

Contrarian angle: when praise hides a hole

There is another reading of this story, and I think it is the more honest one.

A club creating its own event to fill a gap in the official system is good news. But it is also a confession. If demand for junior team match-play below the YouthBCL threshold is strong enough that a coach has to organise it himself, then the official system is not absorbing that demand. A compensating event is not a solution to a structural problem; it is evidence that the problem exists.

The second risk is sustainability. A tournament that depends on one enthusiastic coach and the goodwill of a few individuals inside the federation depends on specific people. When Porter moves on, when Neil Rogers or John Mackey change roles, will anyone still put their hand up? Co-production models have speed as their advantage; speed is also their weakness — they start quickly because they need no institutionalisation, and for that same reason they can dissolve just as quickly.

The third risk concerns data. The “1 Star” label sits inside Table Tennis England’s event taxonomy, yet the source text does not define the grade, nor state the calendar year of the event. The acronym TAP appears without a full expansion. For someone whose trade is reading numbers and dates, those are blanks to verify before citing. Three entries is a reasonable starting figure for a first year, not an indicator of scale.

And one thing should be said plainly about how stories like this are usually told: we praise clubs’ self-reliance so warmly that we forget that self-reliance is carrying part of a responsibility the official system has not yet reached. Praise without questions is the fastest way for a gap to be accepted as the norm.

Takeaway: freezing a table tennis memory

In 2026, the tournament fell silent. I realised applause does not need a grandstand. A few years after that silence, a coach on England’s south coast opened a small event for teams with nowhere to stand and got an answer from two offshore islands. That is how a sport heals itself: not with a forty-page strategic plan, but with a very concrete question asked by someone accountable to his own students.

On that 10 October, even with only three contingents, someone will step to the table with slightly trembling hands because they are wearing a team shirt for the first time and playing a second and third match in the same day. Small events like this do not create legends. They only create the conditions in which legends can emerge.