Bischofsgrün is a lovely small town with a brand-new sports complex. In total, 16 participants from Albania, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Germany, Greenland, Ireland, and Sweden took part in the course. The course was led by two experts — Tina Riedl from Austria and Maria Jönsson from Sweden. 

Kim Meyer from the Bavarian Badminton Association explains that the Shuttle Time programme’s main aim in Germany is to bring badminton to the schools and to convey the fun of this sport to the pupils. 

In two and a half days, the participants delivered many sessions and got a lot of experience along the way, working with children and teachers, and bringing the fascination of badminton to the students. All participants flew back to their home countries with many new ideas, experiences, and motivation, willing to bring badminton as the most exciting sport into the schools. 

Last year, Tina Riedl was delivering the course as an assisting expert but this time she was leading the course. “I am really happy with the performance of the participants. Everybody was very motivated and willing to share their already existing experience in different sections. The participants are now the ones ‘in charge’ of organising and educating a lot of the new Shuttle Time Teachers and Tutors in their countries.” 

The team was completed with Maria Jönsson who took on the role of assisting expert for the first time. “I’ve had a nice working cooperation with leading expert Tina Riedl and I’ve also had great support from her. The participants were very motivated and I hope that they will continue working on developing Shuttle Time in their countries using their respective Trainer and Tutor certificates. To some of them, Shuttle Time was new but they soon found out how to work with the tasks we asked them to deliver.” 

After the course, Shuttle Time National Coordinator Carolin Ruth from Germany will be gathering her trainers/tutors team together to plan the next steps and figure out how to develop the programme for the very complex school system in Germany. 

Miko Kongstad from Greenland already has an idea on how he wants to develop the Shuttle Time programme in Greenland. ”My idea is to show the teachers how to use the Shuttle Time resources in order to attract pupils to try badminton in many different cities in Greenland.” 

Badminton Europe‘s Development & High Performance Officer Tommi Saksa is glad with how the course went. “I was pleased that we had so many participants from different countries. I would like to thank the German Badminton Association for hosting the course — and the facilities for hosting such a course were excellent, really modern and with everything located within the same complex. I am looking forward to seeing how the participants will be developing badminton in their home country using the Shuttle Time programme.”