Worthing and the 1 Star Event: When a Club Digs a New Layer Beneath Youth Table Tennis

On 10 October, in Worthing — a seaside town in southern England — a junior table tennis event called Junior Team 1 Star will begin play. Scanning the entry list, my eye stops on two names: Jersey and Guernsey. Two islands in the English Channel, hundreds of kilometres by sea from Worthing, are still sending people across the water to play in a tournament whose biggest prize is probably just a few extra matches. In my leather notebook I write that line in blue ink: "1 Star — 10/10 — two players per team — progressive knockout." For a reporter used to covering national junior events, a club-level fixture like this is usually passed over. But after thirty years holding a pen, I have learned that what sits at the base of the system is what determines the height of the peak. The topsoil has been trampled flat by studded boots, but what we need still lies undisturbed beneath it. To understand why a small event in Worthing matters, one has to look at the structure of English junior table tennis. At the top sits the Youth British Clubs League, YBCL for short — the strongest junior team competition, played across national weekends, with heavy travel costs, reserved for clubs with enough resources. Below it are JuniorBCL and CadetBCL, split by the Junior and Cadet age bands, played more locally, with less travel, lower cost and a more flexible format. But at the base of that pyramid there is a gap. Not every club can get into YBCL. Not every team manages to enter JuniorBCL or CadetBCL before the 16 September and 28 October deadlines. And so hundreds of children of growing age, who need team match-play to learn how to compete alongside others, suddenly have nowhere to play. Matt Porter, head coach of Worthing Table Tennis Club, saw that gap. He said something to colleagues in Jersey that I copied verbatim into my notebook: "What can we do for our boys and the other teams that haven't got in?" The question sounds small. But it is a systemic question. The Junior Team 1 Star event is an intelligent design at exactly the layer it targets. The two-player-per-team format, in a progressive knockout, means a losing team is not eliminated immediately but continues in a lower bracket. That is a deliberate choice. For a development event, the goal is not to crown a champion but to guarantee each child as many matches as possible. A twelve-year-old who travelled three hours to Worthing should not go home after two games. The two-player format is also telling. It suits small clubs and hard-pressed regions that cannot field full squads. Jersey and Guernsey — two islands off the English coast — are living proof. They do not lack talent. They lack opponents close to home. Looking at how Table Tennis England handled this event, I recognise a model I call co-production: the club initiates, the federation supports. Neil Rogers and John Mackey — two names appearing in the acknowledgements — represent the federation's events team and TAP. They did not organise this event. They enabled it to exist. The model has an obvious advantage: low central cost, high local ownership. Matt Porter feels the event is his. Lisa De Poerck of Jersey Table Tennis feels the same. When people own an initiative, they nurture it far better than when they are merely complying with a directive from above. What is striking is the speed. From initial idea to a scheduled match date, the process moved so fast I had to check it twice. A light-touch approval system for sub-elite events — that is something many table tennis nations, including stronger ones than England, do not have. But there is another detail in this story I cannot stop thinking about. Worthing won their division last season. They have reason to be proud. Yet looking at the bigger picture, a club that wins a junior division still has to open a new event with its own hands to give its students more matches. That is a signal about the thickness of the system, not merely about the quality of one club. The Worthing story is handsome. But if I stopped there, I would be letting down the children I have watched leave the hall because there was no competition to play. The co-production model has one fatal weakness: it depends on specific individuals. Matt Porter could do this because he is a coach with vision, connections and time. If he moves on, does the event survive? If Neil Rogers and John Mackey change roles, does the approval process stay as light? I have seen this in Vietnam. Junior events built by a handful of devoted people, running for a few seasons, then quietly disappearing when the founder moves elsewhere. I have written about such tournaments, and I have closed their tracking notebooks with my own hands. An empty stand lays bare the cracks that the years had plastered over. The second risk runs deeper. When clubs fill the gap themselves, the federation may come to feel it need do nothing. The clubs are handling it. But if local handling becomes the norm, a real capacity shortfall at the federation can be concealed. The 1 Star event treats the symptom. It does not answer why so many teams fail to get into YBCL in the first place. In Vietnam I used to sit in the empty afternoons at Lach Tray stadium, watching boys chase balls on the side pitch. I found myself at nineteen in a ball boy on a side pitch. That boy had technique. That boy had hunger. What that boy lacked was a system thick enough to keep him. I once wrote about Cao Xuan Tu, the golden boy of the port land whom I excavated at the national U15 qualifiers at Lach Tray in 2026. Four assists in three matches, seventy-three successful touches, a head of dyed blond hair standing out on the pitch. Then the pandemic arrived, the stands emptied, an ACL ruptured in a training match, and three months later the club terminated his contract under financial pressure. I had called him the next pearl of Vietnamese football. I was wrong. Not wrong about the talent, but wrong about the thickness of the soil beneath that pearl. Vietnamese table tennis has national U15, U18 and U21 events. But between those national events lie gaps of months, where a child has no team match to play. We talk a great deal about a shortage of talent. We talk far less about a shortage of matches. The Worthing 1 Star event cannot solve the talent problem. It can solve the match problem. And in youth development, matches are what turn technique into instinct. There is one more aspect I want to stress, because it is routinely overlooked in discussions of youth development in both England and Vietnam. The 1 Star event does not produce stars. It produces habit. A child who plays team table tennis once a month learns to trust the person beside them in a way a child who only plays singles never will. In table tennis — a sport people usually imagine as a solitary battle — the team element seems out of place. Yet that is precisely what separates a good player from a grown athlete. When I asked Lisa De Poerck why Jersey are taking part, her answer was not about results. It was that the Jersey boys' team did not get into YBCL this year, and the boys still need somewhere to play. Do not ask who a young player is; ask what he will fossilise into. The answer depends on how many layers of sediment are laid over him in the decisive years. Worthing did something small but pointed in the right direction. The question for Vietnamese table tennis is not how many national events we have, but what a child in Hai Phong or Can Tho has to play between them. Dreams do not leave; they settle into sediment, waiting for another rain.