With the end of the 5th week of Semester 1 just finishing it seems a reasonable time to have a look at how well the Edinburgh University Badminton Club is doing. It is a fairly straight-forward answer in that EUBC is currently going from strength to strength as both a club and a team. With over 160 fully paid members the club is seeing an increase in membership over the 140 members from the end of last year, and that is before the semester is even finished. It is also worth pointing out that this is an absolutely massive increase over the membership from two years ago with one and a half times the initial 100 members back then. Also as there is often a second influx of members after “Refreshers week” it seems likely that the club won’t stop growing yet.
More than just membership numbers but EUBC is seeing more and more people enjoying playing games across all club sessions, even those on Saturday mornings. This increase has also led to more players entering the social tournaments with 41 players having signed up for the Badminton Scotland’s student tournament. With the increase in membership there has been a dramatic increase in attendance at socials. The first major badminton social of this year saw approximately 40 “shuttlers” in a pub-crawl across Edinburgh and every week we tend to see in between 20 and 30 people coming along to Vodka Revolution for drinks and dinner.
Not just the club is doing well though, with the increase in members there has also been an increase in the number of teams EUBC is fielding in various tournaments. With 6 men’s teams and 4 women’s teams playing in the Lothian League across several divisions, and doing well in the majority of their games. Not only this but this year saw the introduction of EUBC 2 and EUBC 3 (our second and third team) to the BUCS tournament against other Universities.
The 2nd and 3rd teams are not just new for the sake of new though and have indeed not lost a single match against an opposing University team yet this year. As well as this EUBC 1 (our first team) have also matched the lower teams and have won every single match they have played this year and considering this is against the other top University teams in Scotland it is an outstanding achievement to be doing so well and the win-to-loss ratio of individual players also seems to suggest that we will not be seeing any change in performance any time soon.
All in all EUBC is currently making it’s way as one of the strongest clubs in the University of Edinburgh with both a large and pleasantly social club combined with a whole swathe of strong and winning players and teams.\
