Our 2020 Review

What a crazy year! Looking back to March 2020 when we were sat at the All England, never did we think that Coronavirus would have impacted our lives as much as it has over the last 9 months.

With 2020 nearing an end, we wanted to do our first Yearly Review – looking back at the highs, lows, and lessons of 2020. We have reflected on every month, and chosen our top highlight. We encourage you to do the same, it was a great way to find the positives in what has been a difficult year!

We hope you enjoy it!

Our Monthly Highlights

  • January – Greg won the National Championships 2020 in Mens Doubles.
  • February – Greg gained his first caps for England at the European Mens Team Championships and Jenny gained a few more at the Women’s event. We both had some good wins at the Barcelona Masters. We both lost out in the Mixed Doubles to teammates Marcus Ellis and Lauren Smith in 3 sets, and Greg lost in the QF of the Men’s Doubles to a world ranked top 20 pair from Chinese Taipei.
  • March – The last tournament of life as we knew it! The All England 2020. Jenny was in the Women’s Doubles but unfortunately had to withdraw after a few points due to an injury. As badminton lovers, we went back every day to watch!
  • April – We created Badminton Insight! Looking back at our first video we created on the 7th April, we did numerous (*hundreds of) takes, but we still look extremely nervous!! Hopefully we’ve slightly improved since then…
  • May – We released 10 videos by the end of May – all ‘at home’ content, having gained 435 subscribers so far!
  • June – We continued making videos and training from home, nothing too exciting happened in June… Apart from we did our first ever YouTube giveaway. We had 30 entries, Jen was so excited when we got 1 as she didn’t think we’d get any!
  • July – Back in January we booked a holiday to Italy. We didn’t know until the last minute whether we’d be able to go… But thankfully we were able to, we had a great break and the highlight of our 2020 happened: We got engaged!!! The day before we left for holiday we also hit 1000 subscribers, achieving one of our first goals that we set for Badminton Insight.
  • August – We attempted our Guinness World Record, if you want to read more about it you can check out the full blog post here!
  • September – Our YouTube channel started to see some big growth, with the release of our most successful video so far (How To Play A Backhand) and we hit 3000 subscribers! We also launched our first product / service on our website, Virtual Coaching.
  • October – Back to competitive badminton! The Denmark Open was the first tournament back on the World Tour. Greg reached the Quarter Finals in the Mixed Doubles, this would usually be a great achievment however with no Asians playing it went from the highest level tournament there is to essentially a European Champs! Unfortunately over this period our partner Tom Wolfenden decided to finish his professional career, this came at the same time as many other badminton players around the world. It was so sad to see! As well as growing up with Tom and being good friends for many years it also left us short of a MD partner and XD partner. 
  • November – We were guests on “A Year On Tour With Vittinghus”, the podcast by HK Vittinghus. A great experience and we’d like to do some more podcasts in the future! November was a month filled with hard training, but the end of November was the start of hardly training for Greg! He was accidentally hit on the head in training with a racket and suffered from concussion as a result, which you can read about in much more detail here. As if the year hadn’t hit us hard enough already!!
  • December – The England Challenge Cup and the European Mixed Team Championships qualifier events where Jenny picked up another cap for England, and won all of her matches over both competitions. Greg was unable to play in both events due to his concussion.

Our Reflections On Badminton Insight

The lack of on-court training and competitive badminton from April did have one huge silver lining for us. We had the time to create Badminton Insight! As we mentioned in our podcast with HK Vittinghus, Badminton Insight is something we probably would never have created if it wasn’t for the pandemic where our training, competitions and work came to a halt.

On reflection, it has saved our 2020. Instead of being a year filled with binge-watching Netflix (although that is perfectly acceptable), we have put countless hours into creating videos (learning how to film and edit), developing a website from scratch, writing blog posts, posting on social media more than we’ve ever done before, and creating resources for badminton players, coaches and fans.

We’ve spoken lots about how we have pushed ourselves way outside of our comfort zones during this process and also how we’ve developed many skills along the way. We’re sure we will continue to learn and gain more skills as we continue with Badminton Insight in the future!

Looking Forward To 2021

As we’ve realised over the last 9 months, it’s pretty hard to plan anything at the moment! This is something we have struggled with in 2020 as we are both usually very busy with training, work, league matches and tournaments. This means we have to be pretty organised and plan our time in advance. It has been a huge change to not even being able to plan the next 7 days due to the constantly changing restrictions.

However, as we often say – “control the controllables.” So in 2021 here are a few of our goals:

  1. Continue to grow Badminton Insight by:
    Releasing 52 (weekly) videos
    Publish 24 blog posts
    Create additional resources / products to help the badminton community
  2. Winning tournaments around the world and be in a position to be selected for the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham

Here’s one HUGG (Huge Unbelievably Great Goal) that’s not ‘controllable’: Reach 50,000 subscribers by the end of 2021 😱

In each of our Yearly Reviews, we will also share the growth of Badminton Insight. We thought it would be a nice way to see our growth year-on-year. So:

January 1st 2020: 0 Subscribers, 0 Videos, 0 Blog Posts

December 31st 2020: 15,019 Subscribers, 42 Videos, 17 Blog Posts

Our Favourite Quotes Of 2020

  1. It’s impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default. (JK Rowling)
  2. It is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress. (Atomic Habits, James Clear)
  3. The difference between ‘try’ and ‘triumph’ is just a little “umph”. (The Art of Being Brilliant, Andy Cope + Andy Whittaker)

Finally, thank you for following our Badminton Insight journey! We’re looking forward to creating a lot more content in the next 12 months and we hope you will keep following us + enjoying what we’re doing.

Happy New Year!

Greg and Jenny 😄