Nine Boxes Filled, Data Still Empty: Rethinking Youth Table Tennis Scouting Reports in Vietnam

Da Nang, late July. After the final group-stage round of the national youth table tennis championship, a coach placed two freshly printed A4 sheets in front of me. An evaluation of a fifteen-year-old athlete. Nine sections, every one scored: technique 8/10, physical 7/10, mentality 8/10, potential 9/10, attitude 9/10. The last line was in bold: “Recommendation: place in the priority group, specialised pathway over the next two years.”

I read both pages, then asked one question: “In the past twelve months, how many matches has he won against left-handed opponents?”

The coach looked at me, then at the paper. “I haven’t tracked that.”

I asked nothing more. The report was nine boxes full, yet strip away the scores and it contained not a single verifiable data point: no opponent names, no win rates, no point distribution, no date of measurement. A beautiful, empty scouting sheet. I have seen many sheets like it, and I am starting to believe they do more harm than blank paper.

For roughly fifteen years, youth evaluation in this country has followed an imported template: nine sections, each scored, summed into a total, and the total decides who enters the priority list of the province, the federation, the training centre. The template is not irrational. It forces the evaluator to look across nine dimensions — technique, tactics, physical condition, psychology, medical status, nutrition, training environment, opponents, pathway. What it lacks is a constraint: no clause obliges the person filling it in to prove any score with data.

The pressure is real. Parents want a verdict. The coaching staff want a tidy list to submit. Sponsors want a figure to place beside a logo. Within that chain, a report saying “insufficient data to conclude” is harder to accept than one reading 8/10 — even though the first is more honest and far more useful.

The ITTF ranking system manufactures the same illusion. Rankings are computed over a rolling twelve-month window, and they measure how often a player shows up almost as much as how well he plays. A junior who enters five consecutive events will out-point one who enters two and wins both. Looking at the table, people believe they are reading ability; mostly they are reading a calendar.

I work differently, and the reason is not modesty: in 2026 I nearly got it wrong. I had built a spatial-positioning model for the U19 tournament and almost overlooked a full-back simply because he was short. Since then, every judgement I make about a young athlete has to be tied to a verifiable data point, and that data point has to state how many matches, how many opponents, and over what period it was measured.

In table tennis I track five indices: direct service-winner rate per hundred serves; third-ball conversion, meaning whether the shot after the serve produces a point or forces the initiative; rally-length distribution, because it shows which rhythm of the exchange a player actually lives in; performance from 9-9 onwards; and win rate against opponents from outside the locality, which I regard as the real test.

This summer I followed fourteen matches of Tran Nhat Nam, fourteen years old, left-handed, training in Da Nang. His direct service-winner rate was 19%, against a tournament average of 11%. Third-ball conversion 41%, tournament average 28%. His win rate in rallies longer than six shots was only 38%, against an average of 52%. From 9-9 onwards he won 3 of 11 points. Against opponents from outside Da Nang, he won 2 of 7 matches.

Those four clusters of numbers describe an athlete with a very specific and very narrow value: he wins with his first three shots and steadily loses control as the rally lengthens. That is entirely different from “potential 9/10”. It hands the coach one thing to do — improve the footwork and the recovery position after the forehand loop — and one thing not to do: push him into grinding matches against away-from-the-table defenders before his physical base catches up.

In the report that goes upstairs, this boy will be filed under “high potential”. The data says something narrower: he is a three-beat attacking player, strong when serving, weak when receiving against someone who knows how to extend the rally. If the training centre reads that correctly, they will spend six months on recovery footwork and put him against three different styles of defender. If they read “high potential”, they will enter him in more events — and he will accumulate ranking points while the gap widens.

A young player is a broken shard of pottery: the value lies in the firing, not in the wholeness. The firing here is the training environment, the quality of internal opposition, whether he gets to face penhold players or only circles within the same club of shakehand hitters. The nine-box report cannot measure the firing, because it only measures the shard.

The transfer market is an excavation site: everyone sees the artefacts, few can read the stratigraphy. Scouting reports are the same. Scores are the artefacts. What determines value is the stratigraphy beneath them: which opponents, which events, which dates, and who did the measuring.

A report with all nine boxes filled but not one verifiable data point is more dangerous than a blank report, because it looks like truth and therefore is never checked again. In data systems, an empty record with a valid structure is always harder to catch than an error record: an error triggers a fix, while an empty record passes quietly through the entire pipeline and becomes the basis for the next decision.

There is a comparison I use when teaching coaches: an archaeological catalogue that lists period, material and provenance for every artefact in a dig is impressive, but if the person who compiled it never opened the pit, it is a novel, not a report.

I train young coaches in one habit: split every observation into three tiers. The established tier is what can be measured and repeated — “41% third-ball conversion across fourteen matches”. The plausible tier is sound inference not yet verified — “losing long rallies may be footwork; a psychological cause has not been excluded”. The unverified tier is what nobody has measured — “how he handles a penhold opponent is unknown”. Those three tiers must never be blended into an 8/10, because once blended, nobody knows which part of the judgement is solid.

Young players need someone who can read them before they can read themselves. At fourteen, the boy in this story has no concept of “rallies over six shots”; he does not yet know where he is strong and where he is weak. The adults either hold the data or carry the responsibility for finding it.

Excavating the U19 pitch is not about finding a star, it is about finding the traces of a generation — and that holds for table tennis exactly as it does for football. If I recorded an entire cohort of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds at one national youth event, I would have something more valuable than any individual evaluation: how many play penhold, how many are left-handed, the cohort’s average rally length, the diversity of serving. That is a stratigraphic map. An individual can flare and vanish; a generation leaves its traces in how the sport is coached ten years later.

The counterintuitive part is this: a blank report is worth more than a full one. The blank one points precisely to where measurement should go next. The full one closes the file, and nobody opens it again.

Risk that has not been assessed is still risk; it simply has no name yet. The boy nobody has measured against penhold opponents is in a state of “unmeasured”, not “ready”. The two states look identical on paper and entirely different on the table.

This industry rewards people who deliver verdicts. Parents want to hear “your child has potential”. A more honest answer — “he has one outstanding index in the third-ball phase, and nobody has measured him in the seventh exchange” — is harder to sell, harder to be praised for, and far more useful.

That is also why I resist the phrase “prodigy” at thirteen or fourteen. It is a verdict issued before the data exists, and it automatically turns every subsequent defeat into a disappointment instead of a data point.

What I want to see in the drawers of youth training centres is a tenth box, pre-printed with the words “unknown”, and mandatory. Every other box should carry a date of measurement and a match count. If that rule took effect next season, I suspect most of the scouting sheets currently in circulation would come back empty — and for the first time we would know exactly what we do not know.