Lesson from Worthing: When a Club Mends the System's Gap with Its Own Hands

When I follow a table tennis tournament, I am often drawn to the fierce rallies on the table. But sometimes the most important story happens behind the scenes — where a local coach makes phone calls, writes emails, negotiates with the association, obtains permits, books venues, sets up equipment, and creates a tournament from nothing. That is the story I want to tell today. Worthing is a seaside town in southern England, not famous for table tennis. Yet last October, Worthing Table Tennis Club hosted an event worth reading about: the Junior Team 1 Star — a team tournament for young players, initiated by the club itself, with the backing of Table Tennis England. To understand why this matters, we need to grasp the structure of English youth table tennis. The system has three tiers, like a pyramid. At the top is the Youth British Clubs League (YBCL) — the national championship for the strongest club teams, played on national weekends with high travel costs. Below that are the JuniorBCL and CadetBCL — more localised leagues with less travel and lower cost. And below those are supplementary events created by clubs themselves. The story begins when Matt Porter, head coach of Worthing TTC, realised that his club's junior team — along with several others — could not enter the YBCL this year. A team from Jersey did not make the cut. A team from Guernsey faced the same problem. The players still wanted to compete, but there was nowhere for them to play. Instead of waiting, Porter acted. He contacted Table Tennis England and obtained approval to organise a supplementary tournament. The format was deliberately designed: two-player teams competing in a progressive knockout, ensuring no team is eliminated after one loss. Every team gets multiple matches. The scheduling was just as thoughtful: the event fell between the JuniorBCL entry deadline (16 September) and the CadetBCL deadline (28 October), acting as a safety net for teams that missed the official windows. What impresses me most, however, is the governance model. This is a co-production between a local club and a national association. The club contributes the idea and the organisation; the association provides sanctioning and support. Central costs are nearly zero. Local ownership is maximised. It is a textbook example of bottom-up sports development. But let me offer a contrarian angle. The very existence of this event reveals that the official system has gaps. YBCL is too selective. JuniorBCL and CadetBCL are too regionalised. And children who fall through the cracks depend on the goodwill of individuals like Matt Porter. If Porter moves away, the tournament may disappear. A healthy system cannot rely on individual devotion alone — it must institutionalise initiatives and transform one person's vision into a shared asset. This resonates deeply with the situation of Vietnamese table tennis. We have many dedicated coaches at district sports centres, schools, and private clubs. They spend hours every day teaching children. But how many youth team tournaments exist in Vietnam each year? From my experience covering the sport, very few. Most tournaments target national-level selections. A child training at a local club in Saigon has extremely limited opportunities to compete against other clubs. The Worthing story teaches me this: we do not need to wait for a perfect system. Sometimes, all it takes is one person who sees a problem and starts solving it. Matt Porter is not a revolutionary. He is just a head coach of a small club who saw that his kids had nowhere to compete, and could not accept that. I do not know whether the Worthing event will become an annual fixture. I do not know whether it will inspire other English clubs. But I know that a child from Jersey, who might have stayed home that Saturday, took a ferry, carried a table tennis paddle, travelled to Worthing, and got to compete. And that, in itself, is a victory. The question I want to leave you with — for everyone who loves Vietnamese table tennis — is: how many children in our community currently have nowhere to compete? And who will be the first person to start building a tournament for them?