Junior Social Distancing Update

Sat 12 Sep 2020 19:18 Chris Travis

Hi Everyone, I wanted to get in touch and let you know what we've made some small changes to our guidelines on how our junior sessions will run.

Firstly, a quick note to let you know that our sessions are unaffected by the recent announcement from the UK Government restricting social gatherings to a maximum of 6 people. This is because we fall under the exemption for organised sport as our sessions are run according to government approved social distancing guidelines.

BADMINTON England have changed their guidelines, increasing the maximum possible coach:player ratio from 1:5 to 1:15. However, players must continue to be split into groups, containing a maximum of 6 players. Our approach will be:

a maximum of 4 groups [same as before]
each group containing a maximum of 6 players [previously, 5]
each group using different courts and shuttles [same as before]
coaches will be split into 2 teams
each player group will be assigned to a coaching team
coaching teams may be assigned multiple player groups, but the total number of players will not exceed 15 [previously, 1 coach per group]

This change will benefit players as they will receive feedback from multiple coaches and it will allow our more experienced coaches to support our less experienced coaches. Coaches will take the necessary precautions when moving between groups.

When one of our coaches welcomes players at the entrance to the sports hall, we will tell the players which group they have been assigned to for that session. Once players have entered the sports hall, we are unable to make any changes to the groups. Therefore we would really appreciate it if you could please let us know if your child(ren) is unable to attend a particular session. This will enable us to rebalance the groups before the session to ensure that we don't have groups with awkward numbers.

Thanks