Table Tennis England opens 18 DiSE places for 2026–28: when English table tennis chooses to dig the base instead of chasing medals

In the list of eighteen new places announced by Table Tennis England, only four names were printed: Bly Twomey, Abraham Sellado, Kacper Piwowar, Adam Alibhai. The remaining fourteen exist as a single aggregated line — eighteen places, no names, no faces, no clubs, no results tables. Thirty years carrying a leather notebook around youth training halls taught me one thing: the blank space in a press release is usually the most worth digging into. Another detail made me stop longer. In the officials' quotes, the title of the person leading the pathway is printed with a small word in brackets: (Interim). A programme being called a record intake, placed under someone who is not yet formally in the post. I do not read that as a warning. I read it as the most honest detail in the entire announcement. In Hai Phong, whenever Lach Tray stadium hosts a youth tournament, I still sit in stand B. An empty stand exposes cracks that the years have plastered over. This bulletin from distant England, read carefully, tells exactly the story I keep seeing at home: a table tennis nation forced to choose between chasing medals and digging the foundation beneath them. I read the announcement three times. Once for facts. Once to separate programme from propaganda. Once as a geological survey: the top layer is the press release, the middle layer is the funding structure, and the bottom layer is a question no sports body dares answer publicly — what is development for, and for whom. A PROGRAMME WITH NO TABLE TENNIS IN IT The first thing to state plainly, even if it makes the piece less exciting, is that this announcement contains not a single line about table tennis in the technical sense. No matches. No scores. No blades, no rubbers. No spin, no footwork, no service tactics. No rankings, no head-to-head records, no win rates against foreign opponents. Anyone reading it to understand why an English player lost to a French player in an early round will find nothing. Anyone reading it to understand why one fifteen-year-old in Essex was admitted to a programme and another of the same age in Yorkshire was not will also find nothing — and that is precisely the problem worth naming. What was published is the administrative layer of a talent pipeline. Eighteen new places. Total cohort of thirty-six. Academic cycle 2026–2028. Managed by SportsAid. Academic provider SGS College. Programme Lead Paul Johnson. Head of Pathway Natalie Green, with the interim qualifier attached. DiSE — Diploma in Sporting Excellence — is a distinctly British model. It fuses two things: an academic qualification with university conversion value, and a high-performance training programme. A sixteen-year-old entering DiSE still studies, still earns grades, still collects certificates. And still trains table tennis like an athlete. In other words, it is a career insurance policy attached to a child at the most decisive age of a sporting career. In Vietnam we run an almost opposite model: the talent school system. Children enter a specialised sports school, live on campus, train twice daily, and follow an academic curriculum that runs lighter than the mainstream one. The system's purpose is to produce athletes. If the child does not make it, the child goes home — usually with very little in hand. England has gone the other way: produce an adult who can play table tennis at a high level, then hope that a few of them become elite athletes. Two models, two philosophies of human life, two definitions of success. I will return to this, because it is the thorniest point in the whole story. HOW WIDE IS THIS PIPELINE, AND HOW IS IT WIDENING A single intake proves nothing. But the rate of change in the number of places says quite a lot. The first cohort had fifteen athletes. Three more were added later, bringing it to eighteen. The latest intake, for the 2026–2028 cycle, adds eighteen new places, taking the total in the programme to thirty-six. Three data points, side by side, produce a curve. The first curve is expansion: from fifteen to thirty-six is more than a doubling within a few cycles. This is the number the announcement clearly wants remembered, and they are right to say it — SportsAid has allocated Table Tennis England its largest number of places to date. The second curve is the calendar curve. The 2026–2028 cycle spans two academic years, eight units per year, five camps per academic year, one international camp between Year 1 and Year 2, and potential international competition during Year 2. The third curve — and the one I care about most — is the gap curve. The announcement says the increase in places follows positive assessment of the programme over the past two to three years. But it says nothing at all about where the people who passed through earlier cohorts actually went. No former DiSE student appears in a national squad list. No conversion data. No record of who reached a European junior final, who stepped up to the senior team. If I were still the demanding editor at my old desk, I would reach for the red pen right there and ask: you increased the places, but have you demonstrated the conversion rate? They have not. And perhaps they have no obligation to, in a press release. But the reader has a right to know that what is being celebrated is capacity, not quality. TWO TRACKS IN THE SAME CARRIAGE Four names were printed, and they belong to two different worlds. Bly Twomey is a Paralympic table tennis athlete with a Paralympic medal. She competes within the classification system for athletes with disabilities — a separate competitive structure, a separate ranking ecosystem, a separate calendar, entirely distinct from the WTT system for non-disabled athletes. The other three — Abraham Sellado, Kacper Piwowar, Adam Alibhai — are identified by a completely different criterion: they have represented England at the European Youth Championships. These two groups cannot be weighed on the same scale. And their appearing in one list is a design choice, not a coincidence. On achievement, Twomey has already reached the summit of the system she competes in. A Paralympic medallist joining a youth development programme is slightly odd through a purely competitive lens. She does not need discovery. She does not need basic training. Her real function in a cohort like this sits elsewhere: first, a role-model function, so that the other seventeen children can see that this road has a real destination; second, a legitimising function, so that a publicly funded programme has a sufficiently weighty name in its announcement. Technically, her presence alongside non-disabled juniors also reflects a broader trend in British sport and global sport alike: para table tennis is becoming a genuinely strategic segment, no longer an appendix to elite table tennis. And there is a very practical reason. In the non-disabled system, a nation like England must squeeze into an almost closed power structure where a single table tennis nation takes most of the top places. In the Paralympic system, that concentration is far thinner. A national federation with ambition but insufficient resources to compete at the very top of the able-bodied game may find in Paralympic sport a sky where the medal-conversion rate per unit of investment is markedly higher. English table tennis has seen this. It has seen it for a long time. And putting a Paralympic medal into the announcement is a very English way of saying it: quietly, but the message is there for those who listen. WHAT THE PROGRAMME TEACHES, AND WHAT THAT REVEALS This is the section I want young Vietnamese coaches to read most slowly. DiSE has two halves. The first is on-table training. The second is a set of off-table modules: anti-doping, nutrition, lifestyle, and one module with a telling name — cultures, values and behaviours. Reading that list, I immediately see what it implies: the development model here is weighted towards holistic athlete education rather than specialised technical periodisation. They are not trying to turn a sixteen-year-old into a ball-striking machine within two years. They are trying to make that person an athlete capable of managing themselves for a decade. Two more modules say even more. Students gain a Coaching Assistant qualification, and a first-aid qualification. Do you see it? An athlete development programme issuing qualifications to coach and to administer emergency care. That is the design of a sporting nation that has accepted a hard truth: most of the people passing through will not become professional athletes. And that nation has decided to prepare them an exit. That exit runs in two directions. The first is the coaching bench — a player who does not make the senior team can still teach table tennis to the next generation, meaning human resources are retained inside the system rather than ejected from it. The second is sports medicine and safety — a skill set with market value in any sporting economy. And behind all of it sits something that sounds very dry: UCAS points. UCAS is the UK university admissions system. DiSE points convert into admissions points. A DiSE graduate holds a ticket into higher education. This is where I have to pause longest, because it is the fork in the road. A sports programme that awards university points is telling a child: if you fail in sport, you lose nothing. That is a beautiful promise. It is also a safety net most developing sporting nations simply do not have. But that net also filters. To enter, and to make use of the UCAS points, you must be someone who can keep up with an academic programme. Which means you must come from a family stable enough that you need not work part-time, informed enough to know those points are valuable, and lucky enough that your school provides support. Put bluntly: this model inadvertently narrows the talent pool towards university-bound young people. It digs very deep — but it digs inside a hole that has already been marked out. And that is where I start thinking about the talent system back home. THE PRE-MARKED HOLE AND THE UNMEASURED FIELD In Vietnam, a child with table tennis talent is typically spotted at seven or eight, at a district talent class or a provincial club. The child is recruited. The child lives on campus. The child trains twice a day. The child follows a lighter academic curriculum. At fourteen or fifteen, the system must choose: either the child rises to the provincial team, the national youth squad; or the child leaves. And if the child leaves at that age, the child leaves with a faint signature in a file and an education insufficient to compete in any examination that matters. I have said this many times in many newsrooms, at many conferences, and every time someone answers that the residential talent model is necessary, that only high volume produces champions, that every strong table tennis nation does it this way. Half of that is correct. It is true that early specialised volume produces top players. It is true that the residential model delivers results faster than the dual-career model. But the other half of that sentence is rarely spoken, because it hurts: that system digests a large number of children, and most of them are pushed out with nothing to hold on to. Behind a single contract lies a village that stayed awake for three months to raise one pair of legs. That is sacred, and I do not want to speak of it in the tone of an outsider passing judgment. But the price of it must be put on the table. DiSE pays that price differently. It does not funnel everything into one road. It opens an exit. But in exchange, it does not achieve the training volume of the residential model — and that is why the camp model matters. The programme runs five camps per academic year, plus one international camp between Year 1 and Year 2. This is camp-consolidated coaching, not daily coaching. Technically, this model only works if and only if the child is already embedded in a sufficiently strong club, with a sufficiently strong coach, at home. The camp is a place of convergence, refinement and measurement. The bulk of the volume is built at home. Which means: the quality of an entire national programme depends on the quality of the local club system. This is a structural feature I consider far more important than the number eighteen, and it is almost never mentioned in announcements. Compare Vietnam: we have camps, residential centres, national youth squads. What we are severely missing is a dense enough local club network to hold a child through the roughly twenty months between call-ups. And this is where I begin to doubt what I believed for thirty years. WHEN A NUMBER OF PLACES IS CELEBRATED AS AN ACHIEVEMENT I read the headline a fourth time. It was about a record number of places. I asked myself: since when did the number of seats in a programme become an achievement worth announcing? My answer is: since the money behind the programme became the story. The entire programme does not, ultimately, pay for itself. It exists because SportsAid — a British charity managing athlete funding programmes on behalf of Sport England, the state sports agency — allocates places. And SportsAid allocates places based on programme assessment. A programme seeking a good assessment must tell a story of expansion. Expansion is the easiest thing to prove, the easiest to count, the easiest to turn into a headline. Conversion — a former student genuinely reaching the senior team — takes five to ten years to measure, and during that period the programme still has to ask for money regularly. So people tell the expansion story. I say this not to accuse anyone. In Vietnam we do exactly the same, except we tell it through athlete numbers in training centres, medal counts in minor categories, tournaments staged. The logic is identical: measure what can be counted, announce what can be counted, avoid what needs time to measure. Do not ask who a young player is; ask what they will fossilise into. Because the real question of any development programme is not how many people it admits, but how many are still standing on a court ten years later. And that small word in brackets — interim — makes me consider another possibility, less often discussed. It is possible that English table tennis's talent pathway is genuinely in a leadership transition. The person heading the long-term strategic machinery is not yet formally appointed. Meanwhile, the most necessary tasks at this stage — building alumni tracking, measuring conversion rates, establishing transparent selection criteria — all require someone with sufficient authority and sufficient tenure to do them. This is a slow risk. It will not collapse the programme within a year. It erodes the programme across a decade. WHERE ENGLISH TABLE TENNIS SITS ON THE MAP There is a beautiful paradox few mention: England is where this sport was organised at world level — national federations gathered to found the world governing body on English soil nearly a century ago. Yet at the elite competitive tier, England sits on the periphery. That is a paradox of status, and it shapes the entire strategy. At the dominant global tier, a single table tennis nation holds most of the top places. Behind them are Japan, South Korea, Germany, France, Sweden. Among emerging forces are India, Brazil, Egypt. And England sits in the last group — the hosting and participating tier, not the contending tier. A national federation in that position has two roads. The first is to concentrate all resources on a few exceptional individuals, hoping that one day a player reaches the deep rounds of a major. The second is to widen the base, accept slowness, and hope that within a generation there will be a group large enough to raise each other's standard. English table tennis has chosen the second road, and DiSE is its instrument. This choice is strategically rational, but it carries a structural weakness I must name: it generates no story for media to cling to. Widening a base produces no beautiful snapshot. An eighteen-year-old reaching a last thirty-two at a major is photographable, writable, sellable. A twenty-year programme is not. That is why programmes like this always live in financial fragility, in England as in Vietnam. And that is also why SportsAid's allocation decision for the 2026–2028 cycle matters more than anything written in the announcement. It is a reversible decision. A place cut in the next cycle is not big news. But it is the single most useful early indicator worth watching from this story. SOMEONE LEFT OUT OF THE ANNOUNCEMENT I write this section with a very particular feeling. In 2026 I sat at Lach Tray stadium recording every stroke of a fifteen-year-old with dyed blond hair. I went home, wrote two thousand five hundred words, and called him the jewel of the port city. The piece was widely shared. I became more famous. He went nowhere. Three years later, his ligament tore during a training session with no spectators. Months after that, the club terminated his contract under financial pressure. And in the list of Vietnamese table tennis's failed names, he is a line nobody reads. I stayed silent for four months after that. I retell it now, reading Table Tennis England's announcement, because there is something neither the announcement nor the coverage of it will mention: money and structure are not the only variables. There is another variable inside a human body, one no planning document can measure — ligaments, and the fear that lives behind a ligament. A youth development programme cannot protect a student from tearing an anterior cruciate ligament at seventeen. But it can decide that a first-aid qualification and a lifestyle module are not appendices. It can decide that nobody is pushed back onto court before their head is calm. It can decide that the second phase of a career is worth as much as the first. Those are three lines scattered through DiSE's module list, written very drily, and I consider them the most important part of the whole programme. Nobody has yet produced an absolute prophecy about a young talent. Forty years watching them pass through, I have drawn exactly one certainty: what decides their fate is not which child has pretty metrics at fifteen, but whether at eighteen, when the first injury arrives, somebody is sitting beside them. A LESSON NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR If I take one thing from the English table tennis story for Vietnamese table tennis, it fits in a single sentence: we need to build an exit, and we need to build it before we need it. That exit could be a coaching certificate, a sports-medicine certificate, a vocational route, or a job-referral system inside the sports industry. Anything that lets us tell the parents of a nine-year-old: if you entrust your child to us and they do not become an athlete, your child still has a future. In Vietnam we have spoken about this often. But we usually speak of it in a very distant future tense. We have not done it because it does not directly produce medals. And that very logic is making our talent classes harder to fill in precisely the places where people understand the price of poverty best. Eighteen places, thirty-six people, two academic years, five camps a year, one international camp. Those are the countable things. The uncountable thing is this: among the eighteen names newly written into the list, how many will become a line nobody reads. I am not writing to answer that question. I am writing to hang it up. And I will come back in a few years, with the old notebook, and mark for myself whether I was right or wrong. Dreams do not leave; they settle into sediment, waiting for another rain. This morning, somewhere near Sheffield, a sixteen-year-old was admitted to a programme with very boring modules on nutrition and first aid. That child probably does not know they have just won something rare, because at sixteen nobody knows that. And I, at fifty-six, sit reading that bulletin in my port city, asking myself: if our system had an exit, where would that exit be, and is there a child here waiting for it right now.