Meet Tina Riedl, a Shuttle Time National Coordinator from Austria. Find out the excellent work she is involved with and how it all started.
I come from a family with no specific badminton background. As I grew up with a bigger brother, I played a lot of sports together with him – mostly soccer, so there was also a big love for every kind of sport, especially team-sports.
With a non-sports background I always had to fight, but I knew you could earn money from sports. So I convinced my parents to allow me to go to my first international tournament despite missing some days in school.
I was always clear that I would never miss a day’s training. So one of the first things I learned was on how to coordinate my time, to spend quality time for learning to finish school and to not miss any training session. I’m happy to say that I finished my school and after this I could make my dream come true, which was working with my favourite sport – badminton.
Love at first sight
When I was eight I attended a children sports group with my brother. After this session, we saw people hitting a funny-looking “ball” with rackets from one side of the net to the other. It was badminton! So my brother and I tried it and immediately fell in love with it.
As I was very young, it was a combination of the sport itself, the person who infected us with the love for this sport (my first coach) and also that even though the sport is individual, there was a group of friends playing together. It was a kind of magic keeping the shuttle in the air.
A deep relationship
This sport has shaped my life. First as a player (from beginner to national team player), player to coach, and then on to administration (working for Austrian Badminton Association in office as Junior Sports Coordinator and now as General Secretary). So badminton has been a big part of my life.
As a player the most memorable events were most of the time when I was winning.
While turning from player to coach, I realised that we are all part of a life-long badminton-family. After competing with and against each other internationally as players, a lot of us meet at international tournaments as coaches. So this shows that through badminton you have a really big, international family, which lasts for a long time!
What badminton means
Badminton is a sport, that is exciting, fun, complex, fast… that makes this sport so attractive. You might be a singles player, but you need at least one other person to train with, and often you train within a group which make this sport sociable.
Experience with Shuttle Time
My experience with Shuttle Time and spreading it in within the country was that especially at the beginning it is as important to “infect” influencers or those who have connections. Through this it was easier to organise more activity.
Shuttle Time equips us with well-prepared books and videos and it was easy to do this. Even at the beginning, when books were only in English (and not in German) it was so easy for German speakers to understand and use the material. What a perfect tool!
Impact of Shuttle Time
Firstly, it was a door-opener to get access to PE teachers, who have/had no direct connection to the badminton community. In Austria a lot teachers play badminton, but they also were looking for source material to teach it.
From experience, we can see that even those without a badminton background can make learning fun with some basic techniques taught in Shuttle Time.
To find out more about Shuttle Time, click here.