Worthing TTC Launches the Junior Team 1 Star: When the Base of the Table Tennis Pyramid Patches Its Own Gaps

The October afternoon in Binh Duong was so hot that the table tennis tables in the centre I visited gave off the smell of damp wood. I sat in a corner of the hall, counting the footwork rhythm of a fourteen-year-old boy running a lateral movement drill. Thirty-seven steps before the ball was served. That rhythm took me straight back to Nguyen Minh Khoi at the HAGL Academy in the summer of 2026 — also thirty-seven position choices before receiving the ball, also that gait of a quiet conductor. The boy in Binh Duong did not know who I was. And he did not know that a few days earlier, in a seaside town in England, a coach named Matt Porter had just done something that few in our industry have ever thought of doing.

On Saturday 10 October, Worthing Table Tennis Club will stage its first Junior Team 1 Star event — a team competition for junior players, two to a team, played in a progressive knockout format. The label "1 Star" sounds small, and it is genuinely small by Table Tennis England's competition taxonomy. But behind a modest event announcement lies an entire youth-development structure that Vietnamese table tennis, if it cared to look, would find itself reflected in.

The story begins with a gap

Porter said that his Worthing team could not enter the Youth British Clubs League — the national team competition for England's strongest junior clubs, played on national weekends at heavy travel cost. The boys' team from Jersey, the island off the French coast, did not make it into the YBCL this year either. So Porter's question was simple: "What can we do for our boys, and for the other teams that haven't got in?"

That is a question I believe few youth-development people in Vietnam ask. We tend to wait for competitions to come from above. We wait for the federation to open an event, for the plan to be approved, for the funding. Porter waited for no one. He asked what his team needed, then organised it himself.

To see why that question matters, look at the structure of England's junior competition system. At the top is the Youth British Clubs League — the arena of the strongest teams, drawing the leading clubs, but carrying enormous travel cost and time. One rung down sit JuniorBCL and CadetBCL — regionalised events with less travel, lower cost and a more flexible format. And at the base, most recently, are supplementary events such as Worthing's Junior Team 1 Star — initiated by the club itself, not mandated by the governing body.

Every generation of players is a layer of sediment. I peel each layer back to find the source.

This three-tier structure is not the product of a perfect plan. It is the result of years of friction, of gaps gradually filled. The YBCL is for strong teams. JuniorBCL and CadetBCL are for teams at a more ordinary level, closer to home. But a group of teams still belongs nowhere: those not strong enough for the YBCL, not convenient enough for the regional leagues, or simply too far away — like Jersey and Guernsey, the two Channel Islands separated by geography. For them, every national event means a cross-sea journey.

That is where a "1 Star" event becomes a geographical solution before it becomes a sporting one. This first staging has drawn entries from Worthing, from Jersey — two teams — and from Guernsey. Three locations, one of them an island, one of them a small seaside town. That is not a formidable field. But they are three junior table tennis communities who have found one another, in a place no one should have had to travel too far to reach.

A two-player team format is not a small detail

I want to pause on a detail that looks like mere procedure: the two-player team format, played as a progressive knockout. It sounds simple, but behind it is a competition-design philosophy that I find clever to an uncomfortable degree.

A progressive knockout means teams are not eliminated after a single defeat. They keep playing. They are guaranteed multiple matches. For an event at the development tier, this matters more than finding a champion. The goal is not to establish who is best — the goal is to give each child as many matches as possible. Every match is a lesson. Every appearance is a step towards maturity.

I have seen the cost of lacking such matches. In 2026, after Nguyen Minh Khoi tore his anterior cruciate ligament in a friendly, I shut myself in my room, rewatched fourteen of his old training sessions on my computer, and cried alone. What I realised afterwards was not that Khoi was unlucky. What I realised was that Khoi had never played enough matches before his body broke. He was praised at sixteen as the heir apparent, predicted to start for the U23s within two years, yet never protected by a competition system deep enough for his body to grow accustomed to match rhythm.

An event that guarantees him many matches — rather than eliminating him after a first defeat — is exactly the kind of system Khoi lacked.

The two-player format carries another layer of meaning. Table tennis is a lonely sport: one person to a table, one person to bear the loss. Pairing two players into a team forces a child to learn to share responsibility, to encourage a partner after a lost point, to trust the person standing beside them. Those are lessons no technical manual contains. At a development tier where many children quit out of a sense of isolation, turning an individual sport into a team experience is a deliberate move.

Who is responsible for the teams that cannot get in?

What struck me most about the Worthing story is not the event itself. It is the governance model behind it. Table Tennis England — through its events team and a unit abbreviated as TAP, with two contacts named Neil Rogers and John Mackey — supported a club-originated event rather than commissioning it centrally. Porter thanked them for helping "from initial idea to scheduled event in a very short turnaround."

This is the point I want to stress. In England, a club coach can propose an event, and the national governing machinery can approve and support it quickly. Initiative sits at the grassroots. Support sits at the centre. The two cooperate, rather than one ordering and the other obeying.

I do not dig for gold; I dig for bones still breathing.

In more than twenty years writing about youth development, I have grown used to a different governance model. Everything flows from above. The federation opens the event. The state provides the funding. The club coach waits for instructions. And when a junior team has no competition to play, no one is held responsible, because no one was given that responsibility. The absence of an event is nobody's fault. It is merely a natural gap in the system.

Worthing shows a different way of imagining things. A gap is not something natural to be accepted. It is a problem to be solved, and the solver can be the person nearest the gap — the coach, the club, the parent.

I ask myself: if in Vietnam, a coach at a small table tennis centre in Binh Duong or Dong Nai called the federation and said, "my team has no competition to play, I want to organise one myself for nearby teams, can the federation support it?" — what would happen? I honestly do not know the answer. But I know that the very ability to pose that question is a sign of a healthy sporting culture. A culture in which people at the base believe their voice can create change, rather than believing everything has already been decided.

What I fear most is not error, but seeing a talent and then watching it fade in silence.

There is another reading of this story, and I want to state it plainly, because I have learned that caution after disillusionment does not mean ceasing to see problems.

The Worthing model has a structural weakness: it depends on specific individuals. Matt Porter initiated it. Neil Rogers and John Mackey supported it. If one of these people moves away, resigns, or loses motivation, the event could vanish. Something organised by a handful of motivated people is rarely as durable as an official tier of the system. Porter and his club hope the event becomes an annual fixture. But a hope is not a line in an official calendar.

There is something subtler still. When the grassroots patches its own gaps, the central system can be shielded from a hard question: why was the gap there in the first place? If clubs quietly keep organising supplementary events like this, pressure to expand the official competition system, to allocate more resources, diminishes. A good solution at the grassroots can sometimes substitute for a necessary solution at the system level. That is the trap youth-development people should recognise before admiring this model too much.

But I still lean towards Worthing. Because the choice here is not between a perfect model and a bad one. The choice is between having an event for the kids to play in October, or having nothing at all. Between an event that might disappear in the future, and a gap that is certainly present right now. Seen that way, a club-made supplementary event still beats an indefinite wait.

Seven fragments and one survivor — youth football after 2026 bears a wound that will not heal.

In 2026, when stadiums worldwide closed for the pandemic, I produced a seven-part feature revisiting seven young players I had once discovered in 2026. Only one remained in professional pursuit. One became a ride-hailing driver. One retired at twenty. After that series I was emotionally spent, took a month off, went home to my mother in Binh Duong, and read no sports article for thirty days.

I tell this not to recall old sorrow. I tell it because it shaped how I view the Worthing story. After seven fragments, I learned that a youth-development system is not measured by the stars it produces, but by the number of children it does not lose. An event like Junior Team 1 Star will not produce a world champion. It merely keeps a twelve-year-old in Worthing, a child in Jersey, a child in Guernsey playing table tennis for one more season. But in my experience, it is precisely those small seasons where talent is either kept or dropped.

I record with my heart, but I value with their own history.

In Vietnam we have the opposite problem to England, and I think it is worth saying. Where England's junior table tennis system is trying to widen its base — more events, more opponents, more match opportunities for small teams — many of our academies are narrowing the base by concentrating resources on a small group of promising players. We focus on U18 results. We physicalise age groups ever earlier. We hunt for a fifteen-year-old who can win a title, instead of building a system in which three hundred twelve-year-olds keep playing when they turn fifteen.

I recall a small observation. At many grassroots events I have attended, the gap between the number of children who start table tennis and the number still playing three years later is larger than any technical gap. Most children do not quit because of failure. They leave because there is nowhere left to play. No team, no event, no opponent of the same age nearby. The death of young talent is mostly an administrative death, occurring in silence, with no one holding a flag at the funeral.

An event like Junior Team 1 Star, seen through that lens, is not small. It is an act of survival.

People see Mbappe at the World Cup. I see Khoi three years earlier, under the Pleiku rain.

In 2026 I wrote a piece urging Vietnamese academies to overhaul their curricula towards speed, inspired by Kylian Mbappe at the Russia World Cup. The newsroom turned it down, calling me a dreamer. Then Khoi tore his ligament. I understood that I had been looking in the wrong place. I looked at the summit — at the speed of a nineteen-year-old genius on the world's biggest stage — while our real problem lay at the base, where children had no competition to play. Mbappe taught me nothing about Khoi. But Jersey and Guernsey are teaching me something.

If there is a lesson Vietnam can draw from Worthing, it does not lie in technique, nor in fitness. It lies in Porter's question: "What can we do for our boys?" — a question directed downwards, towards those with the least voice. That question can be asked by anyone: a coach at a small centre, a parent whose child wants to play, a grassroots table tennis group in a province. No permission is needed to ask it.

The name "1 Star" says it all. One star. The lowest tier in the classification. No glamour, no prize money, no television. But if the base of the table tennis pyramid is patched with such faint stars, only then does the summit have ground to stand on. The story here reaches beyond a single event — it tells of how a system learns to heal itself from below, with the hands closest to the ground.

On 10 October, in Worthing, a few children will play table tennis who otherwise would have had no match that day. I will watch the outcome. Not to learn who wins, but to see whether the organisers stage it again next season. For a gap patched once is still a gap. Only when it is patched consistently, every year, every season, can people call it a system.