Badminton Europe’s Congress kicked off this morning with the Members’ Forum. From 9 AM to 4 PM, the European member associations were invited for presentations and workshops, organized by the Badminton Europe (BEC) staff. More interactive sessions engaged the members and showed a different and improved approach on the forum.
The Forum initiated with a welcome from the BEC President Gregory Verpoorten followed by a presentation by the Member Structures Commission.
The commission’s new initiative the ‘BASIS Programme’ was presented by their chair Emma Mason, who went through the new projects that has been started up since last year. The ‘Badminton Administrative Sharing Information and Support’ working towards helping the members’ grow and sharing their methods with each other.
Mason took the members through the BASIS projects that were carried out during the first year, while Senior Manager Jimmy Andersen explained what the new projects are going to be in the year to come.
- This is my first time here so I was quite excited to see what this was going to be like and I think there has been quite some interesting topics. And, also the chance to get to know a lot of my colleagues from the other European member associations is of course also one of the things that I appreciate by coming here, Bo Jensen, CEO of Badminton Denmark shortly after the meeting.
Workshop sessions in two groups
After a joint presentation in session 1, the members were divided into two groups and had two separate workshops; one by Kristian Friis, digital consultant from SHAPE assisting BEC, and one by Michael Pedersen, founder of Change the Game.
- I am presenting a digital strategy which we are currently working on for BEC and talk a bit about why digital actually important and why do we need to do something within digital today to reach the younger audiences - that’s at least one key element of it, Friis told Badminton Europe before the beginning of the Members’ Forum this morning.
- I think that the badminton community is particularly interesting because it is a community that has shown a lot of leadership around governance already. And if I was to highlight one of many things, I would want to highlight what I see as a very interesting and new model around democratic decision-making that has been developed by the Badminton World Federation, Pedersen explained,
- They have basically moved away from ‘one member – one vote’ and more into a space of saying ‘how can we best motivate member federations through our governance to contribute to the further development of badminton.
BWF's proposals
For the last session, all the members were gathered again, this time to get an update from Badminton Europe’s President and his work in the BWF Council.
President Gregory Verpoorten went through BWF’s proposals for the Annual General Meeting in Bangkok this coming May, which included; Enhancement of scoring system, reducing the on-court coaching, experimental service law (fixed height).
- I think in the same lengths as Badminton Europe. It goes hand-in-hand, especially with the scoring system. People’s attention is very short today especially with youngsters and we need to focus on that. And I think that BWF’s proposal is a solution to make it better, said Chris Spiteri, President of Badminton Malta.
Stay tuned for our livestream of the 6th BEC Awards Gala which will start on Saturday at 7 PM. The livestream will be available from Facebook and YouTube