In recent years, the Americas have made significant progress in terms of developing professional table tennis players and staging international table tennis events, and this upward trend is set to continue with WTT, helping to create a more globally competitive sport than ever before.

In order to better educate and fully integrate the region within WTT’s plans, a webinar was held specifically for ITTF Family members located in the Americas on Wednesday 17 June 2020. Eighty registered members tuned in to the webinar, which was held in Spanish and English at an optimised time for the audience. This followed on from last month’s global webinar and formed part of the ongoing updates on WTT since last year and ongoing discussions with Continental and National Association members on the planned changes from 2021.

ITTF-Latin America President Juan Vila welcomed participants onto the webinar, which featured educational presentations held by ITTF CEO & WTT Director Steve Dainton, ITTF Marketing Director & WTT Director Matt Pound, ITTF Secretary General Raul Calin, WTT Commercial Strategy Consultant Philippe Le Floc’h and WTT Event Strategy Director Stephen Duckitt. The topics mirrored those covered during the global webinar, which you can see here in full, before the Q&A session at the end.

“I express my gratitude to the ITTF Management for organising this webinar with all the Latin American associations. It’s very important for all the nations to understand the concept of World Table Tennis. We trust in the direction of the ITTF Management and we would like to have a better overall understanding about this project, so that we are able to also contribute ourselves. Especially in this difficult moment where we’re dealing with a lot of challenges economically and also on the competitions side, we are going through a rough period in the world of sports, we hope that everyone is well and healthy and let’s hope that in 2021 everyone can come back in a stronger position than before. WTT represents a message of transparency, of bravery, of integration, of leadership, of dreams and of passion on behalf of ITTF and LATTU. I believe that today’s webinar has shown that the sport is moving in the right direction and that table tennis is in good hands.” – Juan Vila, President of ITTF-Latin America

The belief that WTT will help to drive the continued growth of table tennis in all regions of the world, including the Americas, was underlined by Alaor Azevedo, President of the Brazilian Table Tennis Confederation.

“Today we have a presentation we would like to share with you, which focuses on the major benefits that WTT will bring to our sport and its overall importance and highly positive impact on the table tennis industry at large.” – Alaor Azevedo, President of the Brazilian Table Tennis Confederation

Whilst COVID-19 has impacted on many operations and events, the use of online technology has enabled WTT and ITTF team members to have multiple one-to-one video conference calls with many National Association members around the world over the last three months to go through the detail of the new event structure and to discuss the opportunities for National Associations to host events across the different tiers of the new WTT event structure.

Next up there will be a webinar for the players, who are at the core of everything that WTT stands for.