Brighton Table Tennis Club exists to transform lives by providing positive role models, increasing engagement with education and community and improving health and well-being. The Club not only provides people with positive role models and a place to train, but also with an identity, a sense of belonging and a purpose.
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1Founded in 2007 by Tim Holtam, Harry McCarney and Wen Wei Xu, BTTC started small with two worn out tables in the Brighton Youth Centre but with the strong belief that table tennis can be used as a powerful tool in engaging people of all ages and transforming lives. Now a registered charity, today the club has its own full time centre with ten tables in Kemptown and runs over 200 tables across the city in parks, squares, schools, sheltered housing schemes, a centre for homeless people, sports centres and a psychiatric hospital. It works in four prisons outside the city.
More than 1,500 people play in the club’s weekly sessions. As well as nationally ranked table tennis players, the number includes people with learning disabilities, people from the Brighton Travellers site, Looked After Children, people with physical disabilities, people from the LGBT community and young asylum seekers. The youngest player is 2 and the oldest is over 100.
Table tennis is known to be one of the most accessible and exciting sports, helping both physical and mental agility for all ages. As well as being a centre of sporting excellence with national championship players, the coaching training programme is remarkable, uniquely qualifying a wide range of people as coaches, including those with Down’s Syndrome, prisoners, refugees, people living with long-term health conditions, as well as high performance players.
The club is the world’s first recognised Club of Sanctuary, for its work with refugees.
