how come? how come there is so little badminton media coverage published in English? be it online, or in print.

in other languages, there are a lot of websites, the Danish site is quite good, the netherland, french sites all have a lot of coverage and interesting articles in techniques, etc. and there is the japanese magazine which looks quite excellent except i don't know understand the writing. the chinabadminton.com site is also quite excellent with updated articles everyday from newspapers and once in a while a technique article.

as for English, we know of no decent English badminton magazines anymore. IBF used to have one, but they decided to phase that out and go to worldbadminton.net instead.

online coverage, worldbadminton.net is nice, but the coverage completeness is a bit to be desired. sometimes, they just copy and rephrase some of the articles from other newspaper. USAB has one, and that's even worse, only covering local US team. and honestly, who cares about the US team. there used to be badmintonasia.com, which hasn't been updated since June, there is worldbadminton.net and a couple of newspaper from Indonesia and Malaysia with frequent articles.

there also used to be nwshuttle news, which was most excellent. but they decided to stop.

and there is this crummy website, whom i don't think can be called the "media".

and that's about it! have i been very blind? why isn't there more coverage? i love to wake up everyday and be able to see fresh badminton news, in *English*.

Perhaps it is because there is no demand.

Unpalatable as that may seem to us who are really into the sport I feel it is the truth.

I feel that unlike most other sports, badminton has a problem in that whilst thousands of people play, very few of them are interested in anything outside there own club night. They seem to moan about the lack of coverage, blaming everybody (especially the BAofE) but doing nothing themselves.

How many reading this board have actually taken time to sit down and write to the TV companies or the national papers and asked for more coverage. Perhaps if more people did then something might happen.

To misquote an old well known advert...Its good to talk, but far better to actually doing something about it

I write to tv station cbc and tsn every year.
i have written to local paper twice
i have wrote to ibf about the 5x7 in 2000
i have participated in community input in our new local recreation center
i bring up badminton all the time at work, parties and you name it situations
i have pictures of badminton players hanging in my office
i have email badminton avi & mpg to non badminton coworkers

short of running for office, what more should i do Johnboy?

i run this website. ;)


ok. so some of us does spend time and energy and trying to popularize badminton. which i think is very cool. i personally thinks that we should not only benefit from the sport, but also give something back as badminton is really too good a game to be left in the dust.

but results has been some, but does not seem to be enough. what is missing? what else can we do??

Cooler, I have a framed badminton poster (pretty cool '96 Olympic print by Hiro Yamagata - there is a poster shop that sells them regularly on e-bay for $9.95) sitting on my desk, waiting to be hung on my office wall. I might even do it tomorrow. Someplace buried in my to do list for 2002 is sending letters to the major networks and ESPN to show badminton on U.S. TV.

I've also talked up badminton to all of my friends and invited them to try out the game some night. Thus far, I have converted ...... zero (0) of them to the sport. It's pretty discouraging. A lot of my buddies are runners and claim that they wouldn't have time to do both and running is more interesting to them!?! I ran track and cross country in high school and college and was a faster runner than any of these guys when I was in shape many eons ago, and the best non-race run I ever had was only about as good as a poor night of playing badminton.

What is with all of these pathetic, non-badminton minded Americans and Canadians? I think there must be something in the water in North America....

Hi Cooler

I don't think there is much more that you can do except keep on doing it.

The problem is that we are members of a very small group that actually does do something, if more people actualy got of their backsides and 'walked the walk' instead of simply 'talking the talk' (God I hate that expression) then maybe something might happen.

Played in a match last night (we won 8-1, do not even think about who it was that lost the 1 !!!) and managed to steer the conversation round to TV coverage. Of the twenty or so people in the group only three showed any interest in helping out at a junior coaching session (held in their own club hall), no-one was interested in helping out on one of the county committees (three evenings a season) and no one had made contact with the media to ask for more coverage, indeed to at least half of them it was put down as a waste of time and to two people I got the response that it was not their job to do it.

I also asked if any of them could name any of our top players apart from Simon Archer.... three people thought he played with a woman whose name was something like Good and somebody else mentioned Gill Clark (she only knew Gills name from Sky TV commentry, but did not know she retired about 5 or 6 years ago)

With attitudes like this I thing we can expect our sport to flounder for some time

Maybe it just takes one person. One American to take a world title. Then another, then another. By this time sponsorship jumps, especially our buddies at Budweiser, then it catapults from there. Wouldn't it be nice? Imagine going by the local newstand and having a commercial magazine for badminton predominantly alongside Sports Illustrated, Boxing, Auto and Football... Oops... drifted off there.