Catalan Badminton

This weekend saw Badminton Wales Richard Vaughan take the double titles at the Barcelona Badminton Open in Catalunya, Spain. Winning the Men’s singles and Men’s doubles

Former World No7 Vaughan retired from professional badminton two years ago but has kept in touch with the World badminton circuit playing mixed with Welsh Female Number Sarah Thomas, the sixteen year old from Cardiff. The pair are now ranked 48 in the World, and top the European Mixed badminton circuit rankings.

In this week’s tournament Vaughan took the singles title without losing a set beating Berenguer in the final 21-13, 21-13.

National Badminton League

Badminton Wales Richard Vaughan was invited to play in the opening match of the USA National Badminton League (NBA). Co-owned by World Doubles Champion Howard Bach from Anaheim, USA. The match took place at the San Gabriel Badminton club just outside of LA, USA.

The event drew a star cast with Olympic Badminton and World Badminton Champions Taufik Hidayat, and Tony Gunawan from Indonesia, split in to two teams. Other world Class talent included Howard Bach (USA), Nicole Gerther (Germany), Halim (INA), Andrew Dabeka (Canada), Anna Rice (Canada), Mono Santoso (INA), Lilian Chow (USA), and Richard Vaughan (WAL).

The two teams captained by Taufik Hidayat and Tony Gunawan saw a tough encounter with the RVBA's Richard Vaughan winning the important final rubber in mixed doubles with his Korean partner Lee against Halim and Santoso taking the game for Tony Gunawans Blue team 7-6. Vaughan's other match saw him team up with Tony Gunawan to beat Taufik and Halim in the mens doubles.

Badminton Wales

The Badminton Wales Open runs from the 26-29th November at the Welsh institue of Sport, in Cardiff.

This years Badminton Wales event ensures to be exciting with Commonwealth Games Ranking points expected to mean a high turn out from the Commonwealth countries such as Canada, and India.

Badminton Europe

RVBA Players Aimee Moran and Tim Stranks this week focused their training on next weeks European junior Badminton Championships in Slovenia.
Both players are in good form going in to the tournament especially Aimee Moran who lost in the semi final of the English Badminton Gold event in Cwmbran only two weeks ago. Despite this and reaching the final of the Badminton Wales Nationals this year, disappointingly Aimee was not selected for the singles event for Wales at the event

www.badmintoneurope.com

The RVBA’s Sarah Thomas went out in the Last 16 of the European Junior Championships after going down 21-13, 21-14 to Russian Polikarpova in 27 minutes.

RVBA Head coach commented “It has been a great tournament for Sarah, especially beating the 5/8 seed Petranovic in the first round. The Russian today is a tough opponent, she recently one the senior
Estonian International doubles title and has won her matches in the team event. Sarah has two years left in this age group and should really be looking to make a challenge at the next European Junior Championships.”

RVBA - Gean Sou Mo

This week nine year old Gean Sou Mo won this year’s u11 National Badminton Satellite Finals in convincing manor winning the final against Morgan Williams 15/5 15/7.

RVBA Head coach Richard Vaughan commented “It’s a great result for Gean, she has been really working hard the past months and has tremendous talent for the future. She has the best technique for a female player I have seen in Wales at that age, and that’s a big compliment when you have Sarah Thomas, another great talent winning the Welsh Senior Nationals and GB u17 Champs this year at the age of sixteen. Hopefully Gean’s full talent can be realised”.

Gean is part of the RVBA Development group, and has recently signed up a new sponsor in Sotx UK. A great winning start for the partnership.

After their great win over World number 34 pair Makarski & Dimova in the semi final RVBA (supported by Memory Lane Cakes) pair Sarah Thomas and Richard Vaughan faced another inform pair, World Number 27’s Atrashchenkov & Prus from Ukraine.

A close first set saw the RVBA pair take a 18-14 lead, only to miss a few chances to finish the set, which meant the experienced Ukraine pair were able to come back and clinch the set 19-21. A close first half of the second set saw the Ukrainians take a 9-11 lead at the break. Once again controlling the later stages to take the match 12-12.

A disappointing outcome for the RVBA pair but still a great result for the 16 year old Sarah Thomas reaching her first European Circuit Tournament final. This result will move the RVBA pair up to 7 on the European Mixed rankings.

Badminton Wales RVBA

The RVBA (supported by Memory Lane Cakes) players Sarah Thomas and Richard Vaughan made the final of the Romanian Badminton Open in the mixed doubles. In the opening round the RVBA pair beat Charalambidis/Jensen (Dk) 21-17, 21-18, next in the ¼ Final they beat Turkeys Oruc/Kurtulus 21-11, 21-16.

This lined up the semi final tie against the World No34 pair from Bulgaria Dimova and Makaraski who had been in fine form of late beating Top GB pair Lindley last month at the Swedish Badminton Open.

In the opening set the Bulgarians controlled throughout taking the set 21-9. In the second game the Bulgarians took the foot off the gas, changing tactics and allowing the RVBA pair to control the mid court taking the second set 21-17, and similarly the 3rd game a 21-19. A great win for the RVBA pair, especially Sarah Thomas who’s only 16.

In the final is another inform pair, winners of a few of the Badminton Europe Circuit tournaments this year Atrashchenkov and Prus from the Ukraine.
In the main draw of the ladies singles event, RVBA’s Rachel Thomas went out in the first round to Turkeys Kormaz in two close sets 21-17, 21-19.

Sarah Thomas won her first match in the main draw against another Turkish player Toyran, winning comfortably 21-13 21-13.

In the next round she was up against the No2 seed Zechiri from Bulgaria, pushing the inform Bulgarian all the way in both sets going down 15-21, 13-21. A good result for the u17 British Quad Champion.

In the ladies doubles the RVBA pair, the Thomas sisters went out to tough Austrian opponents in the quarter final 16-21 14-21.

The RVBA Badminton club in Cardiff, Wales contains a group of young aspiring Olympic Badminton players, and is directed by Double Olympian and former World No7 Richard Vaughan.

RVBA - Sarah Thomas

The Richard Vaughan Badminton Academy (Supported by Memory Lane Cakes) had a great Welsh Nationals tournament this weekend with sixteen year old Sarah Thomas taking the Senior National title without dropping a set throughout the tournament.

In the final Thomas overcame Carissa Turner 21-13 21-19. The Welsh senior title backs on to her recent success taking the British u17 title in January.

Head RVBA coach Richard Vaughan commented “It’s another great title for Sarah to take as she had a tough draw with tricky matches in every round. Sarah had to work hard both in the semi final versus Carolina, in the final against Carissa and despite not playing her best Badminton she was able to win.

In Sweden last week Sarah played a lot better against the German No1 u19 and lost 16-21 in the third end in the first round of qualification. Sarah just has to keep improving in all areas, results like this weekend help with her motivation. It was great to see a number of Mid Glam player do well, showing the county is moving forward”

Thomas was also top seed in the mixed doubles with Richard Vaughan, however the latter was forced to redraw due to a shoulder injury picked up in the Friday night North Wales Coaching Clinic.

There were also notable good performances from former RVBA players. Vikki Jones won the Mixed doubles, and narrowly lost the Ladies double final with a fellow former RVBA player now studying at Loughborough University Kelly Blake.

Gareth Day reached the ¼ final after some tough games marking some good progress from him in the past year.

The RVBA’s coach Vaughn Tovey went down narrowly in three games in the other ¼ final to Rhys Pritchard.

The next big tournament for the RVBA will be the Austrian Badminton Open in three weeks time.

Badminton Europe - Richard Vaughan

The Gibraltar Badminton Association as part of their development programme once again brought over an International Coach for a week of intensive Coaching. This time it was organised through Badminton Europe (BE) and the Confederation of Mediterranean Badminton (COMEBA). The Gibraltar Badminton Association has been a member of these two International Bodies as well as the Badminton World Federation (BWF) for many years with a view of developing badminton in Gibraltar. The Association had set three main areas of development for this training camp:

Course for coaches.
Training for junior squad
Training for senior squad.

The GBA through BE and COMEBA managed to acquire the services of a high profile player and coach in Richard Vaughan. Richard is currently Performance Director for the Catalan Badminton Federation and runs his own Richard Vaughan Badminton Academy (RVBA) which includes both Tim Stranks, and Sarah Thomas the British junior Quad singles Champions.