Alex, I can’t help but think you have missed the point of Dee’s post – Dee is upset that she has nobody in her area that she could book a court and practice with – you on the other hand are talking about how much you consider it a waste of money to pay for coaching. Everything you have said points towards paying for coaching, and for some reason not enjoying the session (the coach after all will set objectives with you, and help you achieve them – so they can’t be teaching you things you don’t want to learn, unless you didn’t do the objective setting!). However, what Dee wants is to be able to meet up, outside of clubnight, with players who want to improve, and to practice some shots to get better. I do not think this is unreasonable, and its not at odds with what you have said.

It did not come to me that you could ‘practice’ with your friends without someone who has a higher level of technique than you. I suppose there could be some improvement but it is going to be quite limited. That said, I think it would benefit for sure doing it a few times. The idea is a good one although it’s gonna need a bit of structuring.

I suppose it does not really sound like an attractive idea because most players usually make their mind up and decide to improve as much and as fast as possible (giving money), or decide that they are just going to take it casually and have no will to legitimately improve.

Honestly, after being lectured by a national team player in HK for an hour, I learnt that there were so many problems with my play it’s basically beyond repair.

I just gave this topic another look at – if courts cost like 7/8 an hour and a tube of grade B shuttles cost 20 plus in the UK, it’s probably more efficient to hire a coach.

If you think about it, if you practice with a coach, you can get spoonfed during the full hour to you for roughly 35 dollars (all included). Good coaches know what you want to do and are more experienced, creating a structured routine.

If you practice with your friend, you’d get only half the amount of learning. Another important point is that your training friend isn’t a pro, so he/she may not know the proper technique. It would roughly cost about 15 dollars each person. This is because you don’t have a luggage of shuttles which coaches do, nor can you get normal shuttles at the price they are getting. From an efficiency perspective I’d much prefer having the coach.

As this topic is not centralized around me, I’ll leave the rest in brackets.

(Sufficient it is to generalize that I can comfortably defeat almost all club players but will get brutally slaughtered by people who take badminton seriously. Thus, I have little opponents to face who would make it fun for me. Improving would take too much time, so therefore I’m left in an awkward situation. Give me a year back, and I’d rather be the guy being in the lower-mid card in the club. I feel like I’m getting very low returns for extra learning now. I am an AA myself. However, my technique is horrible and my strategy of smash it all is ‘weak’ to a point many middle aged people (even coaches) with tactics and good technique think they can beat me. When I am paired with another AA what I see always happens is their technique and tactics simply get overwhelmed by brute speed and smashes, steamrolling them into oblivion. Why should I learn how to do a spinning net shot when all I need 90% of the time is the lift or the net kill? Any sort of significant improvement and I’m still miles away from the national team players.)

Sorry to hear that you are losing enthusiasm for this glorious game. I would definately suggest going to a higher level club especially one that may have coaches or good players that may offer coaching. Nothing is going to get you back up to your previous level of play (and better) quicker than a coach. A good coach is incredible at spotting deficiencies in your game you didn’t even know you had and of course coming up with remedies to fix them. Also you may find that some of the coaches clients would like to do practice sessions with you. I am sure they could point you in the direction of suitable training partners. Even better if you can get doubles or group sessions so you may be able to meet other people interested in investing time improving their game and set up sessions with them. Good luck I hope you find your enthusiam for the game again.