Worthing launches Junior Team 1 Star: When the base of English table tennis finds its own way not to collapse

On 10 October, a small table tennis event called the "Junior Team 1 Star" will be staged in Worthing, in southern England. No prize money. No international ranking points. Not a single star at the table. Just two-player teams playing a progressive knockout format — meaning a loss does not send you home, because another match is still waiting. The person behind it is Matt Porter, head coach of Worthing Table Tennis Club. The event has already received entries from the host club, a Jersey team and a Guernsey team — two islands off the English coast, in the Channel Islands. Skim it and this reads like an administrative notice you would skip in three seconds. No scorelines, no technique, nothing to quote. But for someone who has followed women's table tennis for 31 years, from Saigon to Shenzhen, that dry name is pointing at a very real crack in an entire system. A coach having to invent an event for his own juniors is a signal worth reading closely, not skimming past. England runs its youth team competition in tiers. At the top is the YouthBCL — the Youth British Clubs League — for the strongest teams, played across national weekends, heavy on travel and cost. Below it sit the JuniorBCL and CadetBCL: more localised, less travel, lower cost, a more flexible format. This is not an ITTF or WTT system. There are no international ranking points and no prize money. It belongs purely to the development layer. And precisely because of that, it reflects the health of a table tennis nation more honestly than any elite table does. The JuniorBCL entry deadline is Wednesday 16 September. The CadetBCL entry deadline is Wednesday 28 October. The Junior Team 1 Star event falls on 10 October — squarely in the gap between those two windows. Sitting in that gap is not a coincidence. It is a design decision. The reason the event exists sits inside a question from Porter, quoted on the Table Tennis England news channel: "what can we do for our boys and the other teams that haven't got in?" Jersey's boys' team did not make it into the YouthBCL this year. Even if they had the level, geography — Jersey and Guernsey sit out in the Channel — turns a national-weekend trip into a burden. That is a logic problem, not a character problem. And when a problem is logic, you patch it with structure, not with slogans. What stands out is that Worthing is not a weak club. Its junior side won its division last season. A club that is currently winning, going out of its way for teams with nowhere to play — that detail deserves more than a single line. The most interesting point is that the official system has three tiers, but real demand needs a fourth. The YouthBCL takes the strongest teams. The JuniorBCL and CadetBCL gather local groups. Those who fit neither — too small, too far, or too newly formed — have no team match-play at all. The Junior Team 1 Star is that fourth tier, built by a club, with backing from Table Tennis England through its events team and TAP. What is TAP? The acronym is not expanded in the original text. That is a point to verify, and I will not speculate. The two names mentioned in a supporting role are Neil Rogers and John Mackey. The fact they are publicly thanked shows the operating model here is co-production: the national body does not organise the event itself, it sanctions, supports, and lets the local club own it. Central cost falls, local ownership rises. This is a common growth model in European table tennis nations, and it is why an idea can move from a desk to a calendar so quickly. The two-player team format is a technical detail worth naming. It lowers the entry threshold as far as it can go. A small club that cannot field five or six players can still pair two athletes and enter. A progressive knockout guarantees each team several matches rather than sending it home after one loss. This is design that targets volume of experience, not the drama of elimination. In junior table tennis, actual matches played are the unit of growth, not trophies. This is where I see a lesson for women's table tennis in Vietnam and China. In Vietnam, there is genuine talent on the women's side, but the number of team events for juniors outside the national selection system is very thin. A promising 13-year-old who has not yet made a provincial squad is usually left with singles only. Play singles forever and nobody learns to be responsible for a teammate, or to lose together and get up together. In China, the selection system is so dense that the bottom layer is almost filtered clean: you are either in or you are off the path. There is no grey zone. The Junior Team 1 Star shows that the grey zone is where the many are raised — and the many are the base of the pyramid. I listen to players before I talk tactics, because the heart always moves ahead of the diagram. That applies to an administrative event too. Format design, entry deadlines, a 1 Star grade — all of that is the diagram. What decides whether an event lives is whether an 11-year-old in Jersey feels she belongs there. The 2026 World Cup taught me that prejudice is only strong when we believe it is the truth. In table tennis, the strongest prejudice is not "women play weaker than men". The strongest prejudice is "women's table tennis only matters once there is a medal". That prejudice is exactly what cuts budgets for the base, because the base does not deliver medals. But without a base there is nobody to climb to the top ten years later. When the arena is at its quietest, I hear most clearly the voices of those who never had a seat on air. In Worthing on 10 October, that voice is the sound of a ball bouncing on a few tables in a small hall. There is one paradox worth stating plainly. If a low-tier event like the Junior Team 1 Star has to be invented by a club coach, pushed by him, sanctioned by him, and then thanked back to officials by him, the question is this: is the official system leaving empty a share of the responsibility it still claims to carry? The sustainability risk lives right there. An event powered by the energy of a few motivated individuals dies easily when those individuals change jobs, move away, or run out of time. In women's table tennis this lesson repeats: grassroots events for women often start on personal passion, survive a few seasons, and quietly vanish when the founder steps back. But I want to argue against myself here. There is another reading: Table Tennis England letting clubs own this is not necessarily an abdication, it is a resource-allocation choice. On a limited budget, a federation cannot run dozens of 1 Star events each season. Empowering clubs while keeping sanctioning and coordination centrally is how you widen the number of playing opportunities without inflating the bureaucracy. The weakness of the model is fragility. The strength is speed and local attachment. The problem is not the model; the problem is whether it gets standardised into an official calendar tier. And this is where I refuse the sweet trap of grassroots storytelling. A community event is not automatically good just because it is kind. If it does not return next year, if the entry list stays at three names, its real value is a small dot on a map, not a system tier. Watch the numbers after 10 October, not only the press release before 10 October. For a Vietnamese writer working in China — where everything tends to be measured in medals and selection slots — this is a reminder that sometimes the most important metric is how many children got one more match, not how many trophies sit in the cabinet. The lesson from Worthing is not how to run a small event. It is the mindset that treats the base not as surplus but as the starting point. Women's table tennis in Vietnam, in China, anywhere, cannot grow if juniors are only seen once they have become stars. A two-player, three-team event with no prize money and no television sounds tiny. But that is exactly the kind of work whose value is only recognised ten years later. And I keep asking myself: in Vietnam, who is doing that work?