About Paul Stewart

Paul Stewart – Advanced Badminton Coach (‘YonexCoach’)

Paul began playing badminton at age 11.

At age 14, he began playing league badminton and quickly rose to first division standard.

Without any formal coaching, Paul was a double winner of the area schools badminton tournament at age 18 and a year later became triple winner of this event.

A car accident at age 25 curtailed Paul’s badminton career and forced an early retirement from the game as a player. Not wishing to leave badminton completely, this lead to an increased interest in coaching and player performance.

Paul qualified as a badminton coach in 1987. His passion for badminton, and a keen desire to learn, ensured a speedy path to Advanced Coach Award. Training to this standard included courses at Lilleshall, Badminton England HQ in Milton Keynes, and many days away at Leeds University.

During this period Paul also began coach training under the watchful eye of Brian Roper, a highly sought after coach in Lancashire who was responsible for the development of Chris Hunt and Andy Fairhurst who won many Mens Doubles titles and European Mens Doubles title.  Chris was also a finalist in Mixed Doubles event of 1994 All England’s with Gillian Clark, and was National Mens Doubles Champion with Simon Archer between 1994 -1999.

Between 1994 – 1999 Paul worked with many players privately and has the distinction that all of these players achieved Senior County honours. The last player he coached, prior to taking a spell out of the game, was Katie Litherland who went on to represent England at both junior and senior level, with a highest world ranking of 22.

Paul is happy working with individuals, teams or county sqauds. He was Head Coach for Greater Manchester Junior Badminton Association between 1995-1999 regularly running 2 squads at weekends. The highlight of coaching these squads was attaining a medal for third place at the 1999 ICT tournament. The ICT is considered the pinnacle of the county junior calendar and is the most highly sought after for team places.

After 10 years away from badminton developing his business, Paul has returned to the game in 2009. He has returned to league badminton playing his first match in over 20 years. He now has a weekly coaching session for league badminton players and is also coaching county juniors as one of the assistant coaches in the Middlewich cell of Cheshire County Juniors.

Through his business activities, Paul is also qualified as a Master Practitioner in NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and has used his training to great effect in both managment and training arenas. These skills will prove to be very useful when working with players who suffer from “big game” nerves resulting in under-performance.

Paul is delighted to renew his sponsorship from Yonex UK. “Yonex has played a major part in my success over the years and I’m looking forward to working with the team at Yonex UK to promote the brand in 2009/2010.”

You can email Paul with your comment or question by going to paul@badminton-coach.co.uk