ITTF launches leadership programme for member association presidents in London

The ITTF is betting that better presidents can change more than meeting rooms. In London, the federation has unveiled a six-month Member Associations Presidents Leadership Programme, built for the people who decide how table tennis is run in 227 countries and territories and who shape the pathways players actually feel at club and national level.

The programme will be introduced at the ITTF World Team Table Tennis Championships Finals London 2026 Presented by ACN, the sport’s premier team event, where the men’s Swaythling Cup and women’s Corbillon Cup are on the line. The timing is deliberate. London is hosting the finals from 28 April to 10 May 2026, exactly 100 years after the inaugural World Championships were staged there in 1926, and the federation is using that centenary stage to push a leadership message as much as a sporting one.

The structure is more ambitious than a one-off seminar. The ITTF says the programme will run through five phases, starting with leadership foundations and moving into individualized coaching, peer sharing and reflection, regular virtual check-ins and a final legacy phase. Delivered with Questline, a leadership development and coaching specialist, it is meant to move presidents from learning to insight, from insight to impact and from impact to legacy. The federation also plans to turn each annual cohort into an evolving ITTF Leadership Insights Report, giving the sport a longer memory than the usual conference slide deck.

That matters because the people in these seats control the bottlenecks that shape the sport below them: youth pathways, coaching investment, access to events, and the standards that decide whether a national structure feels alive or stalled. The ITTF has put that governance layer at the center of its centenary messaging, saying its 227 Member Associations are the backbone of global table tennis and that leadership strength has to match the size of the federation’s ambitions. Petra Sörling has framed the next century around that idea, with the federation presenting the programme as an investment in the presidents who turn policy into local reality.

The launch also sits inside a broader reform push. The ITTF’s centenary constitutional consultations drew in 121 Member Associations and 12 regional dialogues, and the ITTF Board has said the AGM on 3 May 2026 will be invited to adopt a new ITTF Constitution. That is a significant backdrop for any leadership initiative: the federation is not only asking presidents to grow their own systems, it is asking them to help reshape the rules those systems will live under.

There is evidence the federation already sees development as a serious growth engine. At ITTF Summit 2025, it said participation in its development activities had more than doubled in three years to more than 13,000 participants across about 300 activities, with $3 million invested in table tennis development worldwide in 2024. It also reported 92 Participation Programme national activities, 42% female participation across programmes and a record 34 Member Associations progressing through its categorisation system. In that context, the new presidents’ programme looks less like a ceremonial centenary add-on and more like an attempt to narrow the gap between strong and struggling table tennis nations from the top down.