Worthing TTC and the Junior Team 1 Star Event: A Club Patching the Base of England's Youth Development Pyramid

On the morning of Saturday, 10 October, in Worthing, southern England, a youth table tennis event gets underway. Its name sounds dry: Junior Team 1 Star. The organiser is not the national federation, but Worthing Table Tennis Club — a local club with a few rows of tables and a head coach named Matt Porter.

I paused on this item because of one sentence. Porter asks: what can we do for our boys and the other teams that haven't got in? For someone who has spent twenty years taking notes in youth academies, that question carries a familiar echo. It rings out from the bottom of a system, a place few are willing to stoop down and look at.

A three-tier pyramid and a hole at its base

English youth table tennis runs on a fairly clear three-tier pyramid. At the top sits the Youth British Clubs League (YBCL) — the strongest national youth team competition, played over centralised weekends across England. Travel costs are high, squad requirements are heavy, and only clubs with enough players and enough money take part. The middle tier is JuniorBCL and CadetBCL — more localised, less travel, lower cost, more flexible formats. The bottom tier, until now, has been nearly empty.

The Junior Team 1 Star event that Worthing is organising sits in that empty tier. Its target is youth teams that missed out on YBCL, either through failing to qualify for the regional leagues or simply wanting more team match-play. For the first staging, the organisers confirmed entries from Worthing, Jersey and Guernsey — two islands in the Channel Islands, outside mainland England.

Two dates matter. The JuniorBCL entry deadline is Wednesday, 16 September. The CadetBCL entry deadline is Wednesday, 28 October. The 1 Star event takes place on 10 October — after the JuniorBCL door has closed and before the CadetBCL door shuts. That position is no accident. It sits precisely in the window when a youth team, having missed or been cut from an entry round, finds itself with no team competition left to play.

This is the detail I want readers to hold on to. A competition calendar is never a random collection of dates. It is a map of demand.

When a playing format becomes a statement

The most analytically interesting technical point of this event is its format. Teams compete in two-player units, in a progressive knockout. A team that loses is not eliminated at once but continues in a lower bracket. The aim is to guarantee every team as many matches as possible.

To an observer used to elite events, this format looks odd. At the professional level, single-elimination is the norm, because drama is part of the commercial product. But at the development tier, the criterion is not drama; it is the actual number of minutes of match-play a child gets to experience. A team that loses its first match and goes home after forty minutes is a wasted team. The progressive knockout turns every defeat into one more match to learn from.

Two players per team is also a deliberate choice. A two-person line-up suits small clubs and sparsely populated regions, places that cannot assemble four or five athletes of the same age band for a full squad. It lowers the entry threshold — the precondition for widening the funnel.

Then there is Jersey and Guernsey. These two islands are not on the British mainland. Their presence at a local event in Worthing says a great deal about the nature of the barrier. Jersey did not make it into YBCL this year — the report states clearly that their boys' team was not in the YBCL list. The reason may be competitive, but it may equally be geographic: moving between the Channel Islands and mainland England every weekend is a cost and logistics problem, not a technical one.

A localised event solves that problem. Here is the point I want to stress: the biggest barrier for most children playing table tennis in England lies in geography and travel cost, more than in technical level. The national competition system operates on a logic of congregation — pulling the strongest teams into one place. That logic is optimal for producing a champion, but it abandons the teams that cannot show up.

This is where I connect back to Vietnam. Vietnam's youth table tennis competition system also operates on a logic of congregation: the national youth championship, regional events, provincial and municipal teams. A child in a distant district who wants team match-play often has to wait for the national round, or travel up to the province. The gap between those competitions — in matches played, in team experience — is usually left empty.

There is a small paradox I have noticed over years of watching. Federations tend to measure success by medals at the top of the pyramid, yet build infrastructure with budgets allocated to the top of the pyramid. The base has to fend for itself. That is why events like the 1 Star exist.

Co-production: a model where both sides win

The governance structure of the Worthing event is worth recording. The report notes support from Table Tennis England, specifically through its Events Team and a programme abbreviated as TAP, with two named contacts: Neil Rogers and John Mackey. Worthing TTC thanked them for the support, and noted that the turnaround from initial idea to scheduled event was very short.

The model here is co-production: the federation does not organise but enables; the club organises and operates. Central cost is low, local ownership is high. For sports with limited resources, this is a model proven in many places.

I once witnessed a variant of it during the pandemic. In 2026–2026, when stadiums stood empty and youth academies in Saigon faced dissolution, I and a few others connected three former sponsors, ran an online internal tournament, and kept seven U17 players on the books. No federation issued a directive. Just a few people sitting down together, and a little money. That experience taught me that small, locally initiated events often preserve more than large top-down plans do.

But I also learned its reverse side. When everything depends on a few people, everything stops when those few people stop.

Do not read this story through romantic eyes

There is an easy way to read the Worthing story. That is to read it as a nice tale: a devoted coach, a small club, children getting to play. That reading is not wrong, but it skips three structural risks I consider more important.

The first is sustainability. An event initiated by a club, resting on the goodwill of a few individuals and the backing of the federation, depends on specific people. As long as Matt Porter is at Worthing, the event lives. If Porter moves on, or local resources dry up, it could stop after one or two stagings. This is the single-point-of-failure risk that community development models often run into. An event only becomes infrastructure when it is placed on an annual calendar, with standards, a budget, and no dependence on one person.

The second is the paradoxical consequence of the co-production model. When a club does the work the federation should arguably be doing, the club's success can mask a capacity shortfall at the centre. If ten clubs do this, the outward picture looks vibrant. But the question to ask is: does the federation have the resources to open a further lower tier itself, or is it tacitly letting clubs carry that load without a stable funding mechanism? Fast, timely support is a plus for efficiency. It can also be a sign of a process granted an exemption rather than a process designed.

The third concerns the 1 Star label. In the English table tennis event taxonomy, this is a low tier, entry-level and developmental. Ranking it low is reasonable competitively. But care is needed: a low-tier label usually entails consequences — no priority for resources, no media, no ranking points. An event wearing a low label can exist, but it exists quietly. For a tier at the base of the pyramid, quietness is a form of underinvestment.

I think of one more thing. In Vietnam, we often refer to cohorts of players with a collective label — this generation, that generation. That labelling is convenient for storytelling, but it erases the differences between circumstances. Each cohort of players is a stratum; I only sit down and listen to the echo. Each stratum has its own summer, its own tournament, its own coach, its own bus ride. Much of what determines a cohort's fate lies not in the final, but in an afternoon on some Saturday when someone decided to open the gym doors.

People see the goals; I see the silent runs ten years earlier.

A contract is never an end point; it is a piece of a long excavation. With an event like the 1 Star, the same holds: 10 October is not the destination, but a new layer of sediment.

Where should the health of a sport be measured?

A match lasts only 90 minutes, but its story was written many summers before. In table tennis, a match may last only thirty minutes, but its story is the same.

The question I bring back from Worthing is not whether the 1 Star will succeed. It will succeed at its own scale — a few teams, a few dozen children, one day of play. The bigger question is: should a sport be measured at the top of the pyramid or at its base? Measured at the top, England has world-class athletes, and the Worthing story is a small footnote. Measured at the base, how many children get to play a team match on an October day is a far more important indicator than a medal.

For Vietnamese table tennis, I believe we are missing a similar tier, in exactly that position — after selection rounds close and before a new season opens. Time's dust settles on the court, and I lift each brick to look for the signature of fate. The brick at Worthing is small. But it is laid in the right place.

And sometimes, a sport is saved by small bricks like that.