‘Blazing Paddles!’ Are you up for the challenge?

This Autumn will see Brighton Table Tennis Club launch a forthcoming league for businesses to get involved, called ‘Blazing Paddles, a chance for companies to compete and attempt to be crowned the best staff table tennis team in Brighton.

Back in 2018, Brighton Table Tennis Club (BTTC) were up in lights having been awarded both the Special Recognition and the Team of the Year Awards at the annual Active Sussex Sports Awards, so I was keen to find out how the Club have managed over the last few years and caught up with the Founder Director, Tim Holtam to tell me more.

BTTC began life in February 2007 with two worn-out tables in the Brighton Youth Centre with a strong belief that table tennis could be used as a powerful tool to engage people of all ages and help transform peoples’ lives.

Today the club has its own full-time centre with 10 tables and runs 100 tables across the city in parks, squares, schools, sheltered housing schemes, a centre for homeless people, sports centres and a psychiatric hospital, together with four prisons outside the city. The club is the world’s first recognised Club of Sanctuary, for its work with refugees.

Before lockdown, more than 1,500 people played in the club’s weekly sessions and Tim tells me they are slowly building up the numbers again. “These sessions include people with learning disabilities, young people from the Brighton Travellers site, Looked After Children, people with physical disabilities, people from the LGBT community and young asylum seekers. Our youngest player is 2 and the oldest is 98!” 

The impact of Covid and lockdown clearly has been a huge challenge, so in response, they decided to support and reach out to their players and the local community, by creating a Food Hub, and an online service using their volunteers to try and keep the community together. From this, they successfully completed over 100 daily shows before limited playing facilities could resume and sent out postcards to the people who they knew were isolated encouraging safe use of the outdoor tables across the city.  

The Club also developed a national course for leaders of grassroots organisations and designed a course for Young Leaders, based upon table tennis, so people could engage face-to-face and not just online. They also created a new, free to use table tennis online game called All Stars TT for anyone to play on any table anywhere in the world! Despite the pandemic, over 10,000 games were played between July 2020 – 2021 at a time when all other league and national competitions were on hold! 

However, BTTC isn’t just a social Club, they’ve also produced some stars along the way…. With Down’s Syndrome athletes, Harry Fairchild, Andrew Tonkin and Chris O’Flinn securing three bronze medals for Team GB at the World Championships in 2018. 

Additionally, Will Bayley MBE, the World number 1 Paralympic player has been playing in the Senior British League for BTTC over the last three seasons and recently won Silver at the Paralympic Games in Tokyo.  

For more info about entering a team into the ‘Blazing Paddles’ league, and supporting BTTC’s work to improve health, celebrate diversity and build a strong community at the same time, visit www.brightontabletennisclub.com