Beneath the Topsoil of Vietnamese Table Tennis

Beneath the Topsoil of Vietnamese Table Tennis

On a Saturday morning I sat in the third row of the Hải Phòng sports hall. Seven people in the stands. A boy of about thirteen, in an oversized number-six shirt, stood at the right-hand corner of the table. He served three times in a row: twice the ball was smashed straight back at him, once it dropped into the net. He bent down, picked it up, wiped the table with the back of his hand, and served again. Nobody clapped.

I opened my leather notebook and wrote one line: 2.07 p.m., U13 group stage, table four. Then I sat still for a long while.

At fifty-six I am used to stands like this. I found myself at nineteen in a ball boy on a side court. The difference is that in 2026 people still stopped to watch. Now they do not. An empty stand exposes the cracks the years have plastered over.

That boy, beaten 0-3, was still the most interesting thing about the day.

A sport with no transfer market

Vietnamese table tennis does not run like football. There is no noisy transfer window, no million-dollar contract, no agent waiting in a hotel lobby to sign papers. But there is an equivalent. Provincial and departmental teams still buy young players from other localities to strengthen their squads for the national championship and the National Sports Games. What is called a transfer usually happens through one phone call, one apprenticeship slot, one monthly allowance for the family.

Over the past four years I have watched roughly thirty youth tournaments a year. What I see is a system that exists but is thin. The U11, U13, U15, U17 and U19 age groups are still held regularly. The strong centres are still Hà Nội, Hồ Chí Minh City, Hải Phòng, Đà Nẵng, the Army and a few police units. But beneath that surface, the number of children training regularly at grassroots club level is shrinking. Names such as Nguyễn Anh Tú and Đinh Quang Linh in the men's game, or Nguyễn Khoa Diệu Khánh in the women's, remain the backbone of the national team — and very nearly the whole of it.

There are three reasons, according to what I have recorded.

Money is one. A good blade for the U13 age group costs several million đồng; rubbers must be replaced every few months; then come table rental, coaching fees and travel to tournaments. For a family on the outskirts of a city, that is not small.

Time is another. Table tennis demands two sessions a day from a very early age to build reflexes and feel for the ball. A twelve-year-old committed to the sport has little time left for schoolwork, and parents are forced to choose.

And the exit is the third, perhaps the heaviest. A young athlete has only a few paths: step up to the provincial team, reach the national team, or teach the next generation. The number of real places is tiny. Those who fall outside that system do not disappear; they open grassroots classes in the districts and keep raising the next cohort with their own money.

The topsoil has been trampled by training feet, but what we need is still lying quietly underneath.

Reading the first three shots

I stayed to the end of the session and watched seven matches. The most notable thing was not the results.

Since 2026, when the International Table Tennis Federation moved to the 40+ plastic ball, spin has dropped, flight time has lengthened, and long rallies have become more common. The weight of a match therefore shifts to the first three shots: serve, receive and the third ball. Whoever wins that exchange controls the score.

In my notebook, the seven U13 matches that day produced 186 points. Of those, 118 ended within the first five shots — close to two thirds — which means matches are decided precisely where Vietnamese youth programmes invest the least. That surprises nobody who works in the sport, but it raises a question about how training time is allocated.

Technically, most of the children are right-handed and trained to a single mould: forehand loop as the main weapon, backhand mainly for transition. That is not wrong, but it creates a hole. Against an opponent who serves short to the middle or pushes heavy backspin into the left corner, they lose the initiative. Of the 186 points I counted, 41 were lost directly on the second shot — the receive — meaning the point was gone before they could play the forehand they like.

The rule banning hidden serves has been in force since 2026, yet reading spin on the serve is still not taught as a subject in its own right in most youth programmes. Children learn to receive by playing a lot, not through systematic drills.

Physically, the 40+ ball is heavier than the old 38mm ball and demands more strength and more trunk stability. Vietnamese U13s are often slight, their legs are not yet strong, and their lateral footwork is weak. I saw many rallies where a player stood rooted in the middle of the table, reaching with the arm instead of stepping. At a higher level, that is a death sentence. Table tennis looks like a wrist sport; in reality it is a sport of hips, knees and feet.

Psychologically, one pattern repeats. Most of these children play well when leading, but when the score is levelled at eight or nine points in a game, the serve motion shortens and the tempo drops. They are not afraid of losing; they are afraid of being wrong. That is the signature of being coached too much for results and too little for decisions.

On equipment, one small detail stands out: many children use rubbers far harder than their level warrants. A hard rubber feels powerful in practice, but it demands precise technique and wrist strength that U13s do not yet have. The result is an unsafe ball, and the children shorten their swing to compensate, building habits that are very hard to fix later.

The prodigy label

I know this is not easy to hear. But at my age I no longer issue absolute prophecies about young talent.

In 2026 I called a fifteen-year-old the jewel of Hải Phòng youth football, after he produced four assists in three matches and 73 successful touches. Three years later, a cruciate injury and a contract termination sent him back to the outskirts, coaching children. That article exhausted me, and for four months I read no newspapers and watched no football.

I tell this story not to compare two sports. I tell it because the mechanism is identical. People praise very quickly and discard very quickly. The media builds a name after one tournament, and when that name has not reached the national team within two years, attention moves to someone else. The old name is still there, still training, still paying table rent — only nobody writes about it any more.

Do not ask who a young player is; ask what he will fossilise into.

The same happens with sending children abroad too early. Some centres send fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds to China, Japan, Korea or Europe for a few months. The learning itself is good. But without a follow-up pathway at home, they come back with new technique, nobody to play with, and no competitive system to match. Behind one training trip is a family awake for months, feeding a dream they do not control.

I am not against sending children away. I am against sending them away and then leaving them to find their own way home.

There is one more blind spot few people mention. Table tennis is a silent-injury sport. Nobody breaks a leg, but wrists, elbows, shoulders and backs carry enormous load from rotational movements repeated thousands of times a week. At a growing age, most of those injuries need only rest. But rest means losing a place, a tournament, an opportunity. So the children keep training. And at twenty, when explosiveness is needed, the body answers with a small cry that nobody hears.

What I bring home

So what should be done?

Teach receiving as a standalone skill, with its own syllabus, not as an appendage to the forehand loop. If 41 of 186 points are lost on the second shot, that is where the money should go.

Alongside it, physical and footwork training from the U11 age group, at age-appropriate intensity, and rubber selection based on level rather than feel. The 40+ ball has changed this sport; the syllabus must change too.

And a competition system dense enough that a thirteen-year-old plays at least thirty official matches a year. Match experience cannot be replaced by drills.

Dreams do not leave; they settle into sediment, waiting for another rain. What I hope for is not a new prodigy. What I hope for is that boy at table four, seven years from now, still standing there, still serving — and this time with someone in the seats watching.

There are generations measured not by trophies, but by what they dig out of the ashes.