The DiSE Tunnel 2026-28: When English Table Tennis Digs the Foundation Instead of Pouring the Roof

There is a moment I remember very clearly, and it was not at the table but beside it. It was a late-autumn morning, when a group of fifteen- and sixteen-year-old teenagers sat in a row outside a small meeting room at a training centre, each holding a folder thicker than their racket. They had not come to compete. They had come to sign papers. Inside those folders were academic transcripts, medical certificates, scholarship applications, and one section with a strange-sounding title: Post-Sport Career Development Plan.

I sat there with my notebook and asked myself: since when does a young table tennis player have to prepare for the day they stop playing before they prepare for the day they win?

Table Tennis England has just announced a record intake for the DiSE programme - the Diploma in Sporting Excellence - for the 2026 to 2028 cycle. Eighteen new athletes have entered, bringing the total programme membership to thirty-six. A figure the organisers call "a record". A figure that, if you only read the headline, you will nod at and scroll past.

But I did not scroll past. Because in nine years of lurking around youth development systems, I have learned one thing: the driest administrative announcements are often where the most important geological strata are buried. Nobody writes news about foundations. People only write about roofs when they collapse.

Today I want to dig one metre beneath that roof.

Context: A file with no scoreline

Before going deeper, I have to state one thing clearly that many of my colleagues will skip when reading this release. This is a purely administrative document. It has no scoreline. No technique. No tactics. No equipment data. No rankings. No head-to-head records.

If you are looking for an analysis of someone's topspin loop, you have knocked on the wrong door.

But if you care about how a nation builds a youth development system, then this is one of the most important documents English table tennis has issued this cycle.

What is DiSE? Short for Diploma in Sporting Excellence, it is a specialised United Kingdom qualification that combines academic study with high-performance training. It is not for beginners. It is for young athletes who are already capable of handling elite training loads but still need a qualification to have an exit route when their competitive career ends.

The programme is funded by Sport England, administered and allocated by SportsAid, with SGS College handling the academic side. In other words, this is a three-tier architecture: funding, administration, and school.

Table Tennis England is the national governing body running the table tennis side.

Eighteen new athletes have been taken on in this cycle. In total, the programme now has thirty-six members. That number did not come from nowhere. Previously, when the programme first launched, the initial cohort had only fifteen athletes. Later, three places were added, bringing it to eighteen. Then, in this cycle, eighteen more came in, taking the total to thirty-six.

There is a logic here that must be read correctly. This is not growth in quality. This is expansion in capacity.

Among the named athletes, four names stand out. First is Bly Twomey, who has won a Paralympic medal. The other three - Abraham Sellado, Kacper Piwowar, Adam Alibhai - are mentioned as athletes who have represented England at the European Youth Championships.

Four names, two entirely different profiles. Twomey belongs to the Paralympic table tennis system, a separate competitive and ranking ecosystem. The other three belong to the able-bodied junior pathway. Placing them on the same intake list is a design choice, not a coincidence.

The programme runs for two years, from 2026 to 2028. In the first year, students complete eight units. The following year, four additional units. Each academic year has five training camps. Between Years One and Two, there is an international camp. In Year Two, there is potential participation in international competition.

Beyond on-table skills, students are trained in anti-doping, nutrition, lifestyle, and a module called "cultures, values and behaviours". They also receive a Coaching Assistant qualification and a first-aid qualification.

At the end of the programme, they earn UCAS points.

Paul Johnson is the DiSE Programme Lead. Natalie Green is the Head of Pathway, but there is one small detail I cannot overlook: her title is marked "(Interim)" - that is, acting.

That is the entire dataset. There is nothing more.

Now is the time to take out my pickaxe.

Core analysis: Four strata of a place-expansion announcement

The first stratum: The dual profile and the trap of misreading two tracks

The first thing I want to say to anyone modelling the performance of these four athletes: do not fuse the two tracks together.

Bly Twomey already has a Paralympic medal. She has been through the hardest stage of a young athlete's journey - the stage from potential to actual achievement. Meanwhile, Sellado, Piwowar and Alibhai are still at the stage of proving themselves at junior continental level.

One is an athlete who has touched the summit of a parallel system. The others are athletes still climbing the slope of the main system. Placing them side by side on an intake list makes sense for communications. But for performance analysis, these are two problems that cannot be solved with the same formula.

The Paralympic table tennis system has its own classification structure, its own competition calendar, and its own ranking pathway. A top Paralympic athlete does not compete in the same draw as an able-bodied junior. Merging them into a single development programme is a policy signal, not a competitive one.

And what does that policy signal say? It says that English table tennis is betting on two groups at once: able-bodied juniors with international potential, and para athletes with proven results. This is a dual-track investment model.

I have a small experience related to this. In 2026, when I was still taking notes at a lower-tier event in China, I witnessed a young athlete being cut from a talent development programme simply because the coaching staff did not have enough data about his medical classification. He had mild scoliosis - not enough to place him in the disability system, but not enough to keep up with the intensity of the main group. He fell into the gap between two tracks. I wrote about him, but nobody read it.

That is why I look at this list of four names and see more than the release wants me to see. A system capable of embracing both tracks is a system that has learned the lesson of the gap.

The second stratum: Camp structure and the "periodic development" model

Five training camps per academic year. One international camp between the two years. That is the entire direct-contact structure of the programme.

Let me say this plainly: five camps a year is very few.

If you compare this to a young Chinese athlete in a provincial team system, training two sessions a day, six days a week, under the eye of the same head coach for years, then five camps is a colossal distance in contact volume.

But this is where careful thought is needed. The DiSE model does not try to replace the club's daily training system. It tries to supplement what the club cannot provide.

A young athlete in England typically trains at a local club, where they have their own coach. That structure has the advantage of being close, sustainable, and community-bound. But it has the disadvantage of lacking exposure to athletes of comparable or higher level. An athlete who is the best in their club may never know what it feels like to stand across from an equal.

Training camps solve exactly that problem. They are where the pieces meet. They are where a young player from a small town can stand at the same table as an athlete who has competed at the European Youth Championships.

I call this model "periodic development". It does not coach daily. It coaches in rhythms. And that rhythm suits athletes who already have a good foundation at their club, who need "adjusting strata" rather than "laying foundations from scratch".

Three of the four named athletes - Sellado, Piwowar, Alibhai - have already represented England at junior European level. That means they already have a solid technical foundation. They do not need to be taught how to hold a racket. They need to be placed in an environment harsh enough for their next technical stratum to form.

An international camp between the two years, and the potential for international competition in Year Two, are two details I pay particular attention to. They show the programme is not just a class. It is a pipeline to the international stage.

But how long is that pipeline? Where does it lead?

And this is where I start to worry.

The third stratum: Coaching qualifications and the admission that a playing career will end

I want to pause on a detail most other articles will skip: the Coaching Assistant qualification.

This programme trains young athletes to become coaching assistants. They are also trained in first aid.

In many countries, youth talent development programmes focus on a single goal: making the athlete play better. They do not think about the day that athlete turns thirty and their hands are no longer sharp.

In England, people think about it before it even happens.

I have witnessed many young athletes at the third and fourth tiers of Chinese table tennis walking out of the arena and not knowing what they will do next. In that place, there are no stands, no cameras, only people playing for their own story. I wrote about a seventeen-year-old boy who had spent eight years training and suddenly realised he no longer had a place in the provincial team.

That boy had no coaching qualification. That boy had no UCAS points. That boy had no first aid.

That haunts me to this day.

So when I read that DiSE awards a Coaching Assistant qualification and first aid, I do not see it as a secondary detail. I see it as the most important stratum of the entire announcement.

Failure is not a stopping point; it is the deepest geological layer of the truth. A youth talent development system built not on the assumption that all students will succeed, but on the admission that most of them will not, is a mature system.

A programme that prepares a young athlete for both the way up and the way out is a programme designed by people who have seen many failures.

The fourth stratum: UCAS points and the question of the recruited class

There is one detail I recorded in my notebook and underlined three times: UCAS points.

UCAS is the United Kingdom's university admissions system. When a sports programme awards UCAS points, it means it is designed for athletes who intend to go to university.

This is a two-sided signal.

The positive side: it opens a sustainable path for young athletes, who do not have to choose between sport and education.

The side worth pondering: it may narrow the talent net into a specific demographic.

If the programme is designed for young athletes heading to university, then it may inadvertently skew toward a middle class, where the expectation of university is already part of family culture. Young athletes from families without a university tradition, or those who need to start earning early, may not see themselves in this programme.

I am not saying this is a mistake. I am saying this is a stratum that needs careful archaeological examination, because it determines who enters the tunnel and who is left outside.

I once wrote about an empty summer, when all competitions stopped and I sat watching old matches. An empty summer teaches you to hear the echo from old matches. During those months, I learned that the most important thing in sports analysis is not who is on the pitch, but who is absent and why.

Applying that here: when I read the DiSE list, I must also ask about those not on the list.

The counter-intuitive angle: The confusion between capacity and conversion

Now I want to address what troubles me most.

The release uses a consistent narrative frame: record. Record places. Record athletes. Record recognition from the system.

This is a narrative frame based on quantity.

But in elite sport, quantity is never quality. And the most important question the release does not answer is: what happens to those who have gone through this tunnel?

In my own analytical documentation, I call this "the conversion gap". The programme grew from fifteen to eighteen, then to thirty-six. That is a capacity-growth signal. But there is no data showing that previous DiSE students reached junior national team or senior national team level.

Without that data, we do not know whether this tunnel leads to light.

And here is my counter-intuitive point: a programme expanding in capacity while lacking conversion data may be a sign of a system optimising for the wrong indicator.

Think about it this way. If you are a national governing body and you want to prove to funders that you are doing your job well, you need numbers. Places up. Athletes up. Programmes up. These are numbers that are easy to measure, easy to report, easy to persuade with.

But the indicator that truly matters - the number of young athletes converting into national team athletes - is harder to measure, slower to show, and never appears in a press release issued once every two years.

This is not a criticism of Table Tennis England. This is a pattern I have seen everywhere, from table tennis to football, from China to Europe. When a system is measured by capacity rather than conversion, it tends to expand endlessly without improving substantively.

I recall another story. In 2026, when I had just started at a sports magazine, I was assigned to fact-check an article about a youth football academy. That academy claimed to have developed thousands of young players over ten years. I spent three weeks tracking those players down. I found four playing professionally.

Four out of thousands.

When I sent that number to my editor, he told me: "Good work, but we will not write that number. We will write about the four players who succeeded."

I call that the moment I became an archaeologist of failure, not of success.

So when I read about a record thirty-six DiSE places, I think of the thousands of young players who passed through that tunnel and nobody counted. I am not saying this means the programme has failed. I am saying we do not know whether it has succeeded, because we are only measuring the easy part.

There is another way to read this expansion, and it is more positive.

If you look at the funding context, Sport England and SportsAid allocating a record number of places to table tennis is a signal of approval. It means that over the past two to three years, Table Tennis England has done well enough to convince funders that their money is being used well.

This is a different kind of signal from the conversion signal. It is a signal about administrative competence. And in the world of sport, administrative competence can matter as much as coaching competence.

But there is one detail that worries me about the sustainability of that signal.

One small detail: The word "interim"

Natalie Green, Head of Pathway, is listed with the word "(Interim)".

In the world of administration, the word "interim" is a signal. It indicates that the position has not been consolidated. It indicates that the person holding the role may not be the person holding it in the long term. It indicates that strategy is in a state of waiting.

This matters for a simple reason: if you are expanding a programme's capacity while the leader of the pathway is only acting, then there is a gap between the speed of expansion and the speed of consolidation.

I call this the tension between expansion and anchoring. A programme can expand rapidly, but if it does not have a stable leader to anchor its long-term vision, that expansion can become a burden.

I have seen this happen in many places. A football academy expands from twenty to a hundred players in two years, but the technical director changes three times in the same period. The result is a system with no identity, a cohort with no direction, and a pile of paperwork nobody reads.

I am not saying DiSE is heading down that road. I am saying the word "interim" is a small pebble in the shoe, and in long-distance running, small pebbles are what cause the worst calluses.

One more point to note: the programme is described as being for athletes "from around the Home Nations" of the United Kingdom, while being funded "on behalf of Sport England". This is a subtle governance detail, and it raises the question of how financial responsibility is divided among the Home Nations.

If table tennis in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have athletes in this programme, but the money comes from a source tied to a single Home Nation, then there is an asymmetry that needs careful management.

Details like this do not appear in headlines. But they are the geological strata that determine whether a system stands after several cycles.

Risks and what to watch

I want to summarise what I see as the three most important structural risks, and how to monitor them.

The first risk is funding dependency. The entire expansion from fifteen to thirty-six places rests in the hands of SportsAid and Sport England. This is a reversible decision. If funding is cut in the next cycle, the record figure of thirty-six could become a historical peak nobody wants to mention. To monitor this risk, watch the number of places allocated in each subsequent intake cycle. If the number falls below thirty-six, or below eighteen new places per cycle, that is a sign of reversal.

The second risk is the conversion gap. The programme reports more places but does not provide data on where former students go. To monitor this risk, watch for the appearance of DiSE alumni in the England junior national team or in European U21 events. If in three to four years no alumni appear at those levels, then the capacity expansion will be exposed as an expansion without conversion.

The third risk is leadership continuity. If the role of Head of Pathway moves from "interim" to "permanent", that is a sign of stabilisation. If it remains interim across multiple cycles, or if the holder changes, that is a warning signal about a lack of strategic anchoring.

There is a fourth signal I want to watch, though it is less obvious. Home Nations participation. If intake lists in future cycles include athletes from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, that is a sign of a cross-nation integrated pathway. If the list remains concentrated in England, then the phrase "from around the Home Nations" in the release is just a nice way of phrasing things.

Industry transmission: What actually spreads from this announcement

When analysing the impact of an administrative announcement, it is important to distinguish between what actually spreads and what is mere speculation.

This announcement has no impact on the equipment market. There is no mention of blades, rubbers, or any equipment. Anyone who says this programme will affect table tennis racket sales is fabricating.

This announcement also has no impact on the commercial event ecosystem. No tournament is analysed. There is no audience, television, or rights data.

The real impact lies in two strata.

The first is the coaching supply. When eighteen young athletes are trained to become coaching assistants, they become part of the future coaching base. This is a form of reinvestment into the system. A young athlete who learns to coach can pass on knowledge to the next generation, even if their own playing career does not reach the summit.

The second is grassroots demand. A programme involving a Paralympic medallist sends a signal about inclusion. Over the medium term, that signal can support grassroots demand for para table tennis, a segment less subject to the concentrated power of Chinese table tennis than the able-bodied system.

But here is what I want to stress: the multi-agency model of DiSE - national governing body, SportsAid, Sport England, SGS College - is a template for cross-sector funding of athletes' dual careers. It shows a mature sports policy environment, where different organisations coordinate to solve a complex problem. This is a model with reference value for many other countries.

I once visited a table tennis academy in southern China, where young athletes trained eight hours a day, six days a week, and had no classes in nutrition, psychology, or career transition. When I asked a coach there what the children would do when their careers ended, he looked at me as if I had asked a stupid question. "They will keep playing," he said. "Or they will become coaches."

That is a correct answer in a system with countless places. But it is not correct for a system with few places.

In England, where there are fewer places to reach the top, preparing young athletes for a second path is a necessary condition for the system's sustainability.

Conclusion: What I will keep digging

I will say this to finish.

A tunnel widened to let more people through is not a tunnel guaranteed to lead somewhere better. It only means more people will pass through it. Where it leads depends on what is at the other end.

What I see in the DiSE 2026-28 announcement is a system that has learned to prepare young athletes for both the way up and the way out. It has UCAS points. It has a coaching qualification. It has first aid. It has modules on nutrition, lifestyle and behaviour.

That is a good foundation.

But a foundation is not a building.

That is why I will follow these thirty-six names, but not in the way the release wants me to follow them. I will not follow them as future stars. I will follow them as people walking through a tunnel, and I want to know where they will stand when they come out.

Do not rush to bury a season because of the scoreboard; dig one metre deeper, where the foundation may be.

In this case, the scoreboard says thirty-six places. But the foundation lies in what is underneath: how the system measures success, how it prepares for failure, and how it converts potential into achievement.

I will return to this story in 2028, when the Los Angeles Olympic cycle ends. That is when we will know whether the DiSE tunnel truly leads to light.

Or whether it is just a longer tunnel.