Worthing TTC launches the Junior Team 1 Star event: the gap at the base of England's youth table tennis pyramid

On 10 October, a hall in Worthing, on England's south coast, opens its doors for the Junior Team 1 Star table tennis event. There are no world ranking points, no continental qualification places, no names capable of pulling the media in. Teams take the floor two players at a time, in a progressive knockout — lose one match and you still stay in the building.

I have sat through many Saturday mornings in halls like this. What stays with me is never the finals, but the image of children quietly rolling their rubbers into their bat cases after a second defeat, while the day still stretches ahead and their work is already done. For a young player, an early exit hurts less than the feeling of having lost a day, a car journey, a chance to play. The progressive knockout was born out of exactly that fear.

People go looking for stars. I go looking for the first footprints of a journey. This time the footprints sit inside an event you would scroll straight past.

To understand why a local club has to organise a tournament itself, you have to look at the structure of English youth table tennis. At the top sits the Youth British Clubs League, or YouthBCL: the national team competition, gathering the strongest sides, played on centralised weekends and carrying heavy travel costs. Below it sit JuniorBCL and CadetBCL — more localised, less travel, lower cost, a more flexible format, split across the Junior and Cadet age bands.

The distance between those two tiers is not a distance in standard. It is a distance in geography and money. A team in Jersey or Guernsey — two islands in the English Channel, hours by boat from the south coast — may be perfectly capable of playing team table tennis, and still unable to commit to a full YouthBCL season. Jersey's boys' team did not get into the YouthBCL this year. Lisa De Poerck, of Jersey Table Tennis, confirms it, and confirms that they will be in Worthing.

The telling detail is this: the new event does not replace the old system, it fills a hole inside it. The JuniorBCL entry deadline is Wednesday 16 September. The CadetBCL deadline is Wednesday 28 October. The 1 Star event falls on 10 October, squarely between the two entry windows — the moment teams have just learned they missed out, or just let a team season slip, and need somewhere to play. That is not a calendar coincidence. It is design.

This event is a signal of unmet demand at the base of the pyramid. Anyone who follows English youth table tennis knows club team competitions run short of places. But the shortfall here has a clear shape: it is short for those below YouthBCL standard, and short for regions pushed to the margins by geography.

Matt Porter, head coach of Worthing Table Tennis Club, is the man who asked the opening question. He asked what his club could do for its own boys and for the other teams that had not got in. From that question, an event was born. Every young coach is a three-year story nobody has finished reading. Porter belongs to the type I keep looking for: someone who will not wait for a governing body to open a road, but digs a narrow path himself and invites others to walk it.

The way the event is run reveals a model worth studying. The governing body does not stage it; the governing body switches on the green light. Table Tennis England, through its events team and the TAP programme, has supported the launch, with two named contacts, Neil Rogers and John Mackey. Worthing originated it; Jersey and Guernsey answered. This is co-production: low central cost, high local ownership, fast decision-making. The acronym TAP is not expanded in the source text, and England's exact grading definition for a 1 Star event is not stated either. Both details need verifying before they are used as a basis for anything.

The competition format deserves close reading too, because it reveals the organisers' philosophy. Two players per team, progressive knockout. An event where a beaten team keeps playing is an event that puts match volume above elimination drama. At this age the value lies in the quantity of experience, in a child playing five matches rather than one and going home. Two-player team play also teaches something singles cannot: responsibility towards the person standing beside you.

In Japan, where I work, the youth team circuit is dense enough that a team looking for a game only has to pick a venue, not build one. That is what makes the English approach worth watching. A club-run event cannot replace a national system, but it holds one advantage the big system lacks: it can serve exactly the group the system forgot, at exactly the moment they need it.

There is a further layer that rarely gets mentioned. Worthing TTC describes a wider commitment to developing junior players both on and off the table. That is the language of community table tennis, where winning is one panel of the picture rather than the whole frame. Three years watching someone grow slowly. Winning is only one part of the picture. Their side won its division last season, but what they are bringing to Jersey and Guernsey this time is not a trophy. It is a place in the calendar.

One thing should be said plainly, the thing club announcements tend to avoid. The strength and the weakness of this model sit in the same place: it depends on a handful of committed individuals. One coach leaves, one federation contact changes job, and the event can vanish without trace. Light-touch sanctioning turns an idea into a fixture quickly, but it also means the fixture sits inside no budget commitment at all.

Put another way, a club-built event can obscure a larger question: why the base of the pyramid needs individual goodwill to function at all. If this event succeeds and is copied in other places, that is good for the children. It could also become the excuse a governing body uses not to fund the lower tiers. I do not have enough evidence to say which will happen. I only know that a good event can carry a less good consequence with it.

I also have to remind myself not to repeat an old mistake. In 2026 I followed a young player for six months in Spain, writing about him with the certainty of a man who had just found a gem. He played 340 minutes, scored none and assisted none, then sat on the bench for twelve straight matches. I learned that development does not travel in a straight line. With a new event in Worthing, the measure is not whether 10 October goes well. The measure is whether it returns next season, whether more clubs open similar events, and whether the teams that missed out on the YouthBCL actually found somewhere to play.

Under the dust of time, a gem has just given off its first light. But the gem here belongs to no child. It is a small organisational idea, built by people who grew tired of waiting.

What I want to watch over the next six months sits in three places. The number of teams that actually turn up on 10 October, and whether the event is under-subscribed or over-subscribed. Whether it reappears in next season's calendar or turns out to be a single flash. And whether clubs in remote regions see in Worthing a template worth copying. If all three happen, 10 October will be remembered as a small marker — one of those markers on which the youth table tennis history of a country tends to be written, quietly and without anyone reporting it.