Martyn Green has been named the latest recipient of The Essex Corti Woodcock Award.

In memory of an early pioneer of the sport, who promoted it both locally and internationally from the 1920s through to the late 1950s, it is presented in recognition of services to table tennis in Essex.

Essex County Table Tennis Association Chair David Gatheral here describes Martyn’s contribution. Martyn is pictured above with outgoing ETTA Chair, Ken Field.

Martyn Green has run the Essex Junior and Cadet teams since the 2022/23 season. He has been a strong advocate for the Essex Assessment Trials which has enjoyed a long history of being the primary method for identifying and ranking talented cadets and juniors across the county.

It is a controversial method of ranking juniors when we already have a national ranking list which sometimes has to be allowed to take precedence over Essex Assessment Trial results, but Martyn has remained adamant that the trials give our young players the opportunity to come together and play once a year and provide incredibly useful information not just for picking teams but also for granting experience and watching how players perform under pressure.

Without Martyn’s strong leadership, the Essex Trials may have been abandoned, which the Essex County Table Tennis Association believes would have been a great shame.

The first thing Martyn did in post, when he saw the pool of up-and-coming cadet and junior talent in the county, was to start increasing the number of cadet and junior teams that Essex enters into the annual County Championships.

In 2022, he worked with the two Junior teams and one Cadet team which had already been entered, but the next year he added a second Cadet team and in 2024 there is a further Junior team AND another Cadet team to make three Essex Cadet teams and three Essex Junior teams. So, in two years, he has doubled the number of teams and was instrumental in leading this year’s Essex Cadet team to the County Premier title.

Martyn has developed strong relationships with our excellent Essex coaches, Zoli Hosszu, Josh Dye, Lee McHugh, Kieran Skeggs, Liam Squirrel, Martin Edwards, Rik James, Adam Nutland, Keith Fung, Louis Gunn, Paul Davison and several others.

He has a great knowledge of the players across the county available to him and always has the latest TTE rankings for our players within reach.

Martyn has attended all but one of the Essex Junior and Cadet matches since 2022 and many of his players affectionately refer to him as “The Gaffer”!

Martyn has also started commentating on TTE.TV for Table Tennis England and the BATTS Club and his trademark ‘wow!’ has almost become an internet meme. In this endeavour, he represents Essex most wonderfully.

Not forgetting 40 years of service on the Colchester TT Committee and starting and running the very successful Tollgate TT Club, we look forward to Martyn ‘gaffing’ our teams and ‘wowing’ table tennis viewers for many years to come.