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table tennis feature
12 | Touchline issue 23 | April 2016
How many people play table tennis in England? Is this
increasing or decreasing? What are you doing to improve
this.
The number of people playing is generally increasing. The
number of club and league players is quite static unfortunately
but certainly there is a lot of growth in social table tennis. We
have plans in place to grow and support both sides of the sport
but one of our newest initiatives is called Loop. This is the
programme through which we take table tennis to people in
places where they already go – we remove one of the barriers
that exists with facility based sport. We have launched Loop
at Work (putting tables into office environments), Loop in the
Clubhouse (using clubhouse facilities of other sports) and
Loop on Campus (social table tennis schemes on University
campuses). These programmes are not just about putting tables
out, they include a range of activator materials and we recruit
‘Ping Pong Pioneers’ to champion the table and create the
community around it.
How much appeal do you feel that table tennis has to a
wider spectator audience? How are you trying to increase
the appeal?
We know from ticket sales and audience figures from Olympics
and Commonwealth Games that there is an appetite for table
tennis both in terms of spectators at an arena and on television.
Television exposure is so important to all sports, particularly so
the smaller ones, and we have worked with commercial partners
to ensure that the final stages of our National Championships
were televised live on ITV4. This is the first time in decades that
our domestic championships have had this exposure and we will
be working hard to ensure it is not the last.
To achieve this, we had to raise our game to deliver a
Championships which provided an attractive spectacle for
TV and for audiences at home and at the venue, and we
will continue to raise our game going forward to make the
Championships must-see viewing.