Our 2022 Review
It’s that time of the year where we do our ‘yearly review’!
We seemed to have made a tradition of this and have found it to be a great way to reflect on our highlights in the last 12 months (no matter how small!), and also look back at some of the challenges. We hope that by reading our 2022 review it might encourage you to do something similar – we would really recommend it!
Our Monthly Highlights
- January – Knowing we had a busy year ahead, we spent all of January training to get ourselves in a good place for the upcoming tournaments. After last year’s review, we wanted to focus on enjoying our training which is why this was our highlight for January!
- February – We went to watch The High Performance Podcast ‘Live Edition’. This is one of our favourite podcasts to listen to in the car – we’d highly recommend picking out some episodes and giving it a listen!
- March – We went to watch our favourite tournament, the All England! We were absolutely blown away with how many people came up to say hello and tell us that they watch our videos – it was definitely something we’ll never forget!
- April – Our German team (BC Wipperfeld) won the Bundesliga for the first time ever! In the final we went 3-0 down before pulling off a big comeback to win 4-3. It was a really special weekend with a great group of teammates.
- May – We launched the Badminton Insight Bottle! After months of testing numerous samples, we finally launched our first official piece of ‘merch’. We also went to Thailand and played the World Number 1, Zheng and Huang! We vlogged the trip, which we loved watching back as we wrote this review 😃
- June – Another month spent focusing on training, with the highlight being that we went to watch Wimbledon (which has been on Jenny’s bucket list for a long time!)
- July – We took 1 week off training and Badminton Insight work 🤯 For anyone who knows us, this was a big deal. It took weeks of planning (so that we could actually take 7 days off), and we spent this time at home going on bike rides, exploring the local area and watching TV! Looking back at the year up until this point, we had no full ‘days off’ so it was very much needed!
- August – This was definitely the craziest month of 2022. For those who don’t know, 10 days before the World Championships in Tokyo, we got an email saying we had got into the tournament. We’ll link the vlog we made of this tournament here as it’s potentially one of our favourite videos we made this year, and it explains the story and trip in a bit more detail if you’re interested!
- September – We ran our first ever Badminton Insight Coaching Weekend! A group of 12 players travelled to the National Badminton Centre in Milton Keynes for 8 hours of coaching over 2 days, and we had an amazing time! This first one was opened up to our Patreon members only, but hopefully we can run more in 2023!
- October – A month filled with lots of training and 3 club matches in Germany, our highlight was winning these matches and having a good time with the team!
- November – We won the Irish Open! This was an International Challenge tournament, and our first win at this level… And wow it felt great to finally win one of these tournaments!
- December – We played 3 matches for England in the European Mixed Team Qualifiers helping the team beat Slovakia, Norway and Poland. We also reached a career high of 29 in the world!
Reflections On Badminton Insight
In our previous 2 ‘Yearly Reviews’ we’ve shared some Badminton Insight statistics. We want to continue this so here are this years:
- April 1st 2020 – 0 Subscribers, 0 Videos, 0 Blog Posts
- December 31st 2020 – 15,019 Subscribers, 42 Videos, 17 Blog Posts
- December 31st 2021 – 125,981 Subscribers, 96 Videos, 23 Blog Posts
- December 31st 2022 – 266,875 Subscribers, 145 Videos, 29 Blog Posts
Challenges
Reading through those highlights, it might seem like 2022 was all smooth-sailing. But as we all know, life doesn’t quite work like that! So what challenges did we face in the last 12 months?
Well, the biggest one for us was balance. We alluded to this in our highlight for July, but we would say that getting the balance between training full-time, creating weekly YouTube videos along with other Badminton Insight projects, and also trying to make time for each other, our friends and our family is difficult.
We definitely didn’t manage to find the right balance for most of 2022 so one of our goals for 2023 is to put ‘balance’ at the forefront of our minds!
We are of course very aware that if you want to be the best in the world at anything you need to be obsessed and devote the majority of your time and energy into doing that thing, but what we don’t want to happen is for us to stop enjoying what we are doing, whether that’s playing badminton or making YouTube videos! And this is why having balance is one of our goals for next year!
If you’re comfortable sharing your goals, we’d love to know what you’d like to achieve in 2023! Send us an email: [email protected]
Final Words
Lastly, we want to end off this 2022 Review with a huge thank you! Whether you’ve been following us since the beginning in April 2020 or have just watched 1 or 2 recent videos, your support honestly means so much and without it we wouldn’t be continuing to do what we do!
We hope you all have a ‘smashing’ year (pun intended), and we’ll see you soon on YouTube, Instagram, here on our blog, or maybe even in real life!
Greg and Jenny 🏸