“Why did we choose Odense? Because of really good references that we had from other players”, says Katerina Tomalova, who just finished the two weeks training period in Badminton Europe Certificate Training Centre in Odense, Denmark, together with her doubles partner Sarka Krizkova.

“At the end we were really satisfied with everything”, adds the young Czech, who received the BEC scholarship on the basis of her BWF top 100 ranking position in the women’s doubles together with her partner Sharka Krizkova. The girls stayed in Odense from 16th to 30th December 2012.

We stayed in a cosy apartment with four other players. The two of them were our friends from Czech Republic who have been staying in Odense for a longer period. We enjoyed staying with them a lot. Our accommodation was situated near the city centre and around 15-minutes’ walk to the hall.

From Monday to Friday we have been practicing twice a day in the hall. On top of that we had two trainings per week in a gym. Our everyday was morning practice from 8-10 am which started with warming-up, stretching, and stabilization exercises. The training continued with different half-court games, followed by exercises focused on technical improvement. The things we were working on during the morning training were easy to integrate in the afternoon’s session exercises. In the weekends we practised as well, however we mostly played matches. The trainings in the first week of our stay in Odense were mostly focused  on the net game, while the second week we put more focus on the game from the rare court. Our free time we spent in the local sauna and by hanging out with our friends

Our coaches Lennart Engler and Jacob Toft were really helpful, patient, encouraging, as well as full of advises and suggestions on how to improve our strokes.

We think that we’ve learned a lot of new things, improved our technique and got some new ideas about the way of practising which we would like to add into our training sessions back home. We would therefore like to recommend the BEC certificated training centre in Odense to everyone who would like to improve his/her badminton technique and get a “Danish training experience”.

Katerina Tomalova, Sarka Krizkova (Czech Republic)