London: Badminton England has reaffirmed its commitment to providing more opportunities for people to play badminton than ever before following the release of Sport England’s Active People Survey results today.
The Active People Survey 8 results for the period of October 2013 to October 2014 reveal that the number of 14-25 year olds who play badminton regularly has increased by 19% and now exceeds 200,000 for the first time.
The number of youngsters aged from 14-15 playing badminton has also increased by 6,600, a positive reflection on Badminton England’s ‘Smash Up!’ programme aimed at promoting the sport to young people in secondary schools and across the wider community.
Data suggests that organised activity continues to flourish, with the number of people playing competitively has risen over 15,000 in the past two years.
However there has been a 2% drop in the number of people over the age of 26 playing badminton every week from the previous year.
Adrian Christy, Chief Executive of Badminton England, said: “We have done some fantastic work with sports centres, schools and other partners over the past year to provide more opportunities to play badminton than ever before.
“While we can celebrate an increase of more than 20,000 young people playing badminton this year, we are disappointed that the impact of the programmes we have put into place for the older age group is not reflected in the latest figures.
“The challenge for us now is how we react and our commitment is to continue to encourage even more young people to enjoy the compelling programmes available across the country while at the same time analyse our strategy around those aged 26+ and determine how we can improve.
“We also have a positive number of women playing and we will be building further on these numbers through Sport England’s This Girl Can campaign.
“I am also delighted that we are also seeing the organised part of our sport continue to grow. This would not be possible without the tremendous work, passion and commitment of thousands of volunteers without whom sport in this country just could not happen.
“Badminton remains firmly in the top 6 participation sports in the country and we want to build on the latest release of figures and so I am challenging our management team and everyone connected with delivering badminton in England to come together to enable more people to play badminton more often.”
Badminton England
