Viva Brighton Issue #58 December 2017
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MY SPACE<br />
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<strong>Brighton</strong> Table<br />
Tennis Club<br />
Founding Director,<br />
Tim Holtam<br />
“I always wanted to be a teacher but I didn’t know<br />
this was going to happen,” explains Tim Holtam,<br />
founding director of the <strong>Brighton</strong> Table Tennis<br />
Club. “We started small with one evening a week<br />
for local kids at the <strong>Brighton</strong> Youth Centre and we<br />
kept going. We realised that there was potential to<br />
do more and that you could use table tennis as a<br />
tool for social action.” Now, more than 400 people<br />
access the club each week. As well as hundreds<br />
of local kids, there are sessions for the over 50s,<br />
for adults with learning disabilities, for people<br />
who are street homeless, for children from the<br />
Traveller community, for looked-after children, for<br />
unaccompanied child migrants and refugees... the<br />
list goes on. “Everyone involved in the club benefits<br />
from these projects. They are all about integration,<br />
building a strong community and about everyone<br />
playing together.”<br />
Their latest collaboration is with High Down Prison<br />
and Downview Women’s Prison. “It’s the perfect<br />
model for engagement. We’ll go in and run level one<br />
coaching courses, then we can start bussing in some<br />
over 50s and disabled youngsters to be taught by the<br />
prisoners. It’s going to be so good.”<br />
He and co-founder Harry McCarney both played<br />
at an elite level as teenagers and their sporting<br />
ambitions are just as keenly pursued as their social<br />
agenda. Anyone who shows potential quickly moves<br />
up the ranks. “Now we’ve got so many people<br />
playing at a participatory level that we can employ<br />
our coach Pedro full-time to work solely with<br />
our elites; a group of local players who have been<br />
training for over five years and are now ranked<br />
in the top 20 in England for their age. We’re in a<br />
position that no other table tennis club is in. Sport<br />
England and Comic Relief fund specific projects for<br />
looked-after children, marginalised women, women<br />
leaving prison, the homeless and refugees. We got<br />
to go to parliament to speak to Lord Dubs about<br />
refugee policy and our work here, and last week<br />
we were in Portugal watching the World Down’s<br />
Syndrome Championships [where club coach Harry<br />
Fairchild won a medal]. I’ve got an insight into all<br />
these different areas and we’re celebrating what<br />
everyone is able to do.”<br />
He attributes their success to the accessibility of the<br />
sport. “Of any activity, table tennis has the lowest<br />
barriers to entry. It’s really cheap to set up, it’s space<br />
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