“It doesn’t look like much, but you’ll never have seen a club like this,” says Terry McLernon, head coach at Drumchapel Table Tennis Club, as he swings open the door to what he believes is ‘the best club in the world’.

He’s right, it doesn’t look much. In fact, walking towards it you would be forgiven for thinking that this is a derelict, run-down establishment, in a fatigued area of Glasgow.

However, once you step inside, you realise that this is a pearl in a puddle. It may not be the most modern sporting facility Glasgow has to offer but what goes on between these walls is sure to make an impact on the future of Scottish sport.

Founded in 1989, as a means to taking youngsters off the streets of Drumchapel and into sport, the club began in a large hall with a single table. 20 years on however, Drumchapel Table Tennis Club has developed and progressed into a successful club.

This development was highlighted late last month when Drumchapel made history by becoming the first Scottish club to secure the British Premier League title.

Inside the club, a large sports hall is filled with 12 or 14 table tennis tables. Overlooking the hall is a room in which the players are preparing for practice. The room is bustling with conversation, 8-year-olds holding conversations with 50-year-olds.  A snack stall has been set up, where the players can stock up on energy before they play. Working the till is a 10-year-old boy, one of the young players. “There are no rules here, but there is a discipline. All the kids know how to work the tills,” says McLernon.

 Every wall in the room is plastered with photographs displaying snapshots of the history of the club. Two glass cabinets stand in the corner of the room, bursting with silverware, trophies, memorabilia, and evidence of a successful sporting club.

However, the real history of the club lies with one man. He’s known to the local as ‘God’. Born and raised ‘up the hill’ in Drumchapel, Terry McLernon admits that he fell into the same trap as a number of youngsters in the area do.

“I used to run up and down the street fighting with all the boys in Drumchapel, I was quite rough when I was young. We went to school during the day and we were all pals but at night we got into our own wee territories and we had all these rivalries and we used to fight each other”

However, table tennis saved him. After one night at the local youth club, McLernon found something he enjoyed, and he was hooked. “After I went to youth club I never went fighting again. My pals used to run down to fight and I’d run down with my wee bat and go and play sport. I played table tennis really seriously but I was never any good at it. I wasn’t top level; I never did what my club does now. It was just something that I liked doing, something that I wanted to do, I wasn’t forced into it and I loved doing it.”

When he was 18, McLernon gained his coaching award and began to coach in Drumchapel. “It’s been fantastic ever since,” he says. 30 years later, his passion for coaching young table tennis players is still strong.

Along with his son, Terry coaches a number of youngsters on two evenings a week in the club. Inside the hall, 30 youngsters are going through their paces in the warm up. Press ups, sit-ups, jogging around the room. Chart songs ricochet around the hall through a sound system. “The music keeps them focussed and calm,” McLernon says. 

In the group are a mixture of girls and boys. A number of them are the best in the country at their age group while several are only starting out in the sport. “He’s number one in Scotland at his age,” Terry says, as one boy passes, “She’s the best 9-year-old in the country”, he says of a young girl.

However, the majority of the players in the room are beginners, but McLernon has a phrase he uses to define his coaching: “You can’t bore a talented player and you can’t hurry a beginner.” There may be a vast spectrum of talent in the room but all of the players are equal.

“They will get to where they want to go,” says the passionate coach. “The most important thing at this club is that we only have one number 1 every year. We have 60, 70, 100 other players, another 300 in the primary schools and we have to work with them as well. Number one gets what he has to get and everyone else gets the same level of attention, the same talk, same laughs. There’s no difference.”

Having first-hand experience of Scotland’s future top table tennis players, Mclernon has a fair idea of what winning is, but he believes it has more than one meaning. “Winning to Natasha Milliken is everything because she’s Scottish Champion, but winning to Lucy who’s Scottish champion at 9 years old doesn’t matter because we’re not pushing her. You can’t stop winners, there are 30 kids down there, two winners and 28 beginners, you can’t stop it, it’s a walk of life.”

You gauge a real sense of the impact this man and his club has made on the community speaking to one of the youngster’s parents. “Terry has helped big time,” she says. “Getting kids of the street, encouraging them to get into something after school, it’s fantastic. Half the kids would be out on the street if this club wasn’t on.”

Indeed, Mclernon has clearly influenced, and continues to influence, the youngsters in the local area. “I’ve been a volunteer for 20 years, I do forty hours a day, there’s not an hour I don’t think of it.”

But why is he one of the many people in Scotland who give up so much of their time to giving Scotland’s youngsters the best possible chance of reaching their highest level in sport?

“I love it. You see them down there; you’ve never seen a club like this. Nobody has ever seen a club like this. There’s no madness, no blowing whistles, no telling them to stop. We give them an exercise for 15 minutes, they get it right or get it wrong, it doesn’t matter to us. They enjoy it.”

Indeed, McLernon’s attitude towards the youngsters he coaches is that if they enjoy what they do, everyone wins. The club’s recent success is a product of his philosophy, and as table tennis continues to expand in the area, it seems Drumchapel is destined to serve itself towards further silverware in the sport.

IC
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