Pattern recognition
Reading a serve in a fraction of a second is the same skill as reading an attack graph — you are matching a live signal against everything you have seen before.
Table Tennis
Five national league titles. Two Wilmott Cups. One education in pressure.
Before the boardrooms there was the table. Competitive table tennis was my first education in pressure, pattern recognition and recovery — and it never really stopped.
01The story
I came up through London Progress, one of the most successful clubs in English table tennis history. In my years there the first team won the Senior British League Premier Division five times in a row — and took the Wilmott Cup and the Ormesby Cup in each of those seasons as well.
Alongside Jason Sugrue I won the Wilmott Cup — the national team championship of the English Leagues Cup Competition — with West Middlesex in 2000 and again in 2001, first with Chris Hundhausen, then with James Sprackling.
The sport also taught me how to build things from nothing. I helped grow community table tennis in London — ranking schemes and tournaments built so that anyone could walk in off the street and compete, no membership, no barriers.
Wilmott Cup winners — national team championship
02Honours
On the record
- 01Wilmott Cup — National Team ChampionWest Middlesex, 2000 & 2001 — English Leagues Cup Competition
- 02Senior British League — Premier DivisionLondon Progress, five consecutive titles
- 03Ormesby CupLondon Progress, five consecutive wins
- 04Community league buildingOpen-access London ranking tournaments — any standard, no barriers to entry
03What it taught me
The table and the SOC are the same room
Recovery between points
A match is lost by the player who carries the last point into the next one. Incident response works the same way: reset, reassess, play the point in front of you.
Systems beat talent
London Progress did not win five straight titles on flair. It won on structure, preparation and depth — the same things that make infrastructure survive.