Former world and Commonwealth champion Ross Wilson, who called time on his playing career last November due to injury has taken on a new role with the British Para Table Tennis Team as National Coach working full-time with the squad at the UK Institute of Sport in Sheffield.

The 30-year-old three-time Paralympian from Minster in Kent won Paralympic team medals in London 2012, Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 and reached a career high of world No 2 in men’s class 8. In April 2018 he won gold in the men’s class 6-10 singles at the Commonwealth Games in Australia and later that year became men’s class 8 world champion after beating the double Paralympic champion from China in the final.

“I think doing my psychology degree gave me a different perspective of sport,” said Wilson, “and doing another job has made me appreciate how much I love table tennis. I’ve got my Level 1 coaching qualification and also done some mentoring outside table tennis which I really enjoyed – I love helping people and that’s something I can definitely do in this role.

“We’ve got a great team of coaches, players and support staff – we are like a big family, and we all trust each other, and we’ll work as hard as we can to get results. I guess something that I want to bring to the team as a coach is I want to turn us from being one of the best teams in the world to the best team in the world. I want to push the players and the other coaches and work with them to push me to help them as well.

“Through mentoring and doing my psychology degree I’ve definitely got more of an idea of what it takes to be a coach. I’ve been injured for a while and so I’ve been able to do a lot more coaching, and I’ve been trying to help the team by volunteering. I feel like it’s the right time for me to come into this job and flourish.”

BPTT Interim Performance Director Shaun Marples has no doubt that Wilson’s experience and skills as an athlete will bring huge benefit to the team.

“All the candidates we interviewed could talk around the game of table tennis and about technical parts of the game,” said Marples, “but the key thing that stood out with Ross was the tactical elements of the game and how he delivered them on a world-class stage under pressure. His experience will really help mentor players that might not have reached that level yet and will learn a lot from somebody that has and I think he’ll get the respect from the current Performance players but also the Pathway players and the Future players that come into the programme.

“Ross also impressed with how he applied what he’d learned from university and as a player to shape his coaching philosophy and how he can challenge and support athletes at the same time. This is his first full-time coaching role, and he has a great platform to become an excellent coach and the coaching team will help and support him on his journey. The coaches that we have within the team all have the same goal but different styles so I feel that Ross will benefit massively from that as well.”

Recruiting a former athlete back into the team in a coaching role is further proof of the strength of the British Para Table Tennis programme.

“I think it sends a very strong message as a programme that we’ve been able to invest in players that have retired to come into this space and work with the team,” said Marples. “Ross is a former world and Commonwealth champion who was competing in Paralympic Games as a teenager but also had his challenges with injuries and reclassification. He’s bringing a lot of raw knowledge as a player and as a coach he’s going to develop massively. He’s been away at university smashing his degree in psychology, he’s got some great experience mentoring athletes in other sports, and he’s learnt some great skill sets and I feel that the whole team is going to benefit from having Ross as part of the team.

“I think it sends a strong message to the whole squad that there are careers in this sport after being an athlete – we don’t have to bring in external coaches because they are big names. We invest in our people and the biggest message we can give is we developed a family culture in this programme that is really strong and this just cements that in a new direction which Ross will thrive in and no doubt the whole team will as well.”