Worthing launches a Junior Team '1 Star' event: the gap beneath the base of English table tennis

Saturday afternoon, stand B at Lach Tray Stadium, empty. No match, no flags, no loudspeakers. Only the steady roll of balls drifting out from the training hall behind the rows of seats, a sound I have heard for forty years and still cannot tell apart from time passing. I sat there, opened the worn leather notebook, and read again the item a colleague in England had just sent over.

Worthing Table Tennis Club will launch a junior team event called Junior Team 1 Star, played on Saturday 10 October. The person behind it is the club's head coach, Matt Porter. The format: two-player teams in a progressive knockout, which means losing one match still leaves you a match to play. The entry list so far includes hosts Worthing, plus Jersey and Guernsey, two islands off the English coast.

What stopped me longest was the question running the other way. Porter said the club asked itself what it could do for its own boys and for the teams that could not get into the YBCL. An empty stand lays bare the cracks that years have plastered over.

To understand that question you have to understand the pyramid beneath it. English youth table tennis runs on three fairly clear tiers. At the top is the YouthBCL, the strongest club team competition, played on national weekends, carrying heavy travel costs and demanding a squad of real depth. One step below sit the JuniorBCL and CadetBCL, more localised leagues with less travel, lower cost and a more flexible format. The JuniorBCL entry deadline is Wednesday 16 September. The CadetBCL deadline is Wednesday 28 October.

Worthing's new event sits precisely between those two windows: after one door has closed, before the other shuts. Anyone who has run a competition knows that events born in a gap like that are rarely about winning a title. They are there to catch what everyone else forgets.

Jersey and Guernsey offered me a clearer hint about what had been forgotten. Those two islands do not lack players. What they lack is a ferry, a flight, a budget big enough to move a whole team onto the mainland on exactly the weekend the organisers choose. Jersey's representative, Lisa De Poerck, said plainly that their boys' team did not make it into the YBCL this year. For an island, the barrier is geography far more than level.

Sitting in Hai Phong, I found that familiar. Vietnamese youth table tennis also has a pyramid, but most of the weight sits on the peak. The national U15 qualifiers, the national youth qualifiers, the events inside the federation system — a team that fails there sees its season end on the spot. There is no tier underneath to catch the children, to let them play more, lose more, and be part of a team one more time.

The first thing worth analysing is the format. Two players per team is the smallest number that can still create a collective. It is just enough to teach a child responsibility toward the person beside them, and just small enough that a provincial club with three or four trainees dares to enter. The progressive knockout goes one step further: instead of eliminating a team after one loss, the organisers design it so every team plays several matches. That is a philosophical choice, not a technical one. Drama is traded away for volume of experience.

In table tennis, team play teaches what singles cannot. It teaches how to stand outside the table watching a teammate handle the ball, how to swallow your own heat so you do not burn the team's serving turn, how to walk into your match after a teammate has just lost. None of that shows up in any statistical table, yet it is the submerged part of an entire career.

The 1 Star label in Table Tennis England's grading system points to an entry-level tier, a doorway. The name matters less than the fact that it exists: a formally graded event, even at the lowest rank, is a different animal from an improvised friendly in a district hall.

The real value of a tournament lies not in who wins it, but in how many matches it dares to hand to the weakest children in the system. A child who loses all four matches in a day still carries home more than a child who spends a whole season waiting for a substitute slot. Worthing's own page notes that its team won its division last season, and that the club pursues junior development both on and off the table. It sounds like a slogan, until you place it beside the club opening an event for teams that have nowhere to play.

In governance terms, this is a co-production model. The club invents it, the national body gives the green light and lends people. The report mentions Table Tennis England's events team along with two staff, Neil Rogers and John Mackey. The turnaround from first idea to scheduled event is described as very quick, a light-touch, low-paperwork sanctioning process that lets infrastructure grow upward from below.

In Vietnam, the road runs the other way. A club in Hai Phong wanting to open a graded youth event, with standings, with referees, would almost certainly have to wait for an announcement from above. Not because anyone wants to block it, but because the system has no framework for a club standing up on its own. The supply of youth competitions therefore depends entirely on the federation's budget and calendar.

Based on my experience watching youth matches at Lach Tray over ten years, I can say it plainly: most young Vietnamese talent disappears in the gap between two seasons. In 2026, at this same stadium, I wrote a fifteen-year-old into my notebook: Cao Xuan Tu, dyed blond hair, four assists across three matches, seventy-three successful touches. He played so well that I wrote two thousand five hundred words about him alone. Three years later, during the pandemic, an ACL tear in a training match with no spectators. Three months after that, the club terminated his contract under financial pressure. Now Tu coaches table tennis for a youth class on the city's edge.

I do not tell this to mourn. I tell it to show that a torn ligament at eighteen does not end a player's life. What ends it is having no match left to come back to. I found myself at nineteen in a ball boy on the outer court.

Travel cost is a bigger variable than people think. Jersey and Guernsey need a ferry. In Vietnam, a youth table tennis team from Ca Mau, Dien Bien or Lai Chau needs a twenty-hour bus ride and a sum of money not every family can raise. Who goes and who stays home therefore does not depend purely on the player. It depends on the map and on the wallet.

Here I have to say the uncomfortable part. The model of clubs organising things themselves sounds beautiful, and in this particular case it genuinely is. But if it becomes the norm, it can be the way a federation legitimises pushing responsibility downward. Those who cannot organise themselves get no event. And those who can organise themselves are usually the ones who already have an enthusiastic coach, a parents' group that knows how to make calls, a small local sponsor.

That produces a skewed filter. Teams rise not because of the most talented child, but because of the smoothest back room. I have seen exactly this filter across many sports in Vietnam: wherever one passionate person stands at the helm, there is a movement; that person goes away on secondment for a year, and the movement dies. A system that depends on individuals has a single point of failure.

The 1 Star event itself deserves caution too. A tier for those who could not reach the tier above can be a springboard, and it can also be a parking lot. Parking lots are comfortable, so comfortable that nobody wants to climb again.

Still, I choose to trust the way this one began: a coach sitting down, counting his own trainees, counting the teams with nowhere to play, then picking up the phone. The result so far is three localities, two of them islands reached by sea. Behind a contract is a village staying awake three months to raise one pair of legs. Do not ask who a young player is; ask what he will fossilise into.

The question I carried home from Lach Tray that evening was not aimed at England: if a framework like that opened tomorrow in Vietnam, here in Hai Phong, who would be the first to pick up the phone?