THE Guyana Badminton Association’s used this year’s Guyana Olympic Association Olympic Day series of activities to conduct the Shuttle Time Programme and get their long-term plan to have Badminton prominently featured in schools.
Fifteen participants were awarded their Teachers Training Course Certificates and four participants were awarded the Tutors Training Course Certificates.
The programme, which falls directly under the Badminton World Federation (BWF), is geared to make badminton the most popular sport in schools globally, according to the GBA.
“It’s quite a simple method; it’s premised on educating Physical Education teachers to conduct badminton lessons,” a release from the GBA stated.

The three-day course, which was held at the (GOA) boardroom, was conducted by Jamaican Richard Wong.
Wong, who is a BWF Shuttle Time tutor and coach, told that the programme is not in-depth and is not structured to make the teachers coaches.
“We want to make the lessons fun, safe and have the kids experience success from the very beginning, and the Shuttle Time has been instrumental in that. The Shuttle Time Programme has been implemented in various countries across the Caribbean, and it actually helped in promoting the sport because it gets, as I said, teachers, P.E teachers or even regular teachers to teach a badminton lesson,” Wong explained.

“The programme is very simple; all the resources have been provided for the teachers so basically when a teacher takes a Shuttle Time course and decides to implement the programme all they have to do is go back to their school, look in the resources we give them free and just decide what lessons they want to teach,” Wong pointed out.
The target group was Primary and Secondary school teachers, and while the aim is to introduce children aged 5-15 to badminton, the programme can be adapted to any settings.
Shuttle Time is the first such programme to be hosted in Guyana, and it came to fruition following GBA president Gokarn Ramdhani’s representation at the BWF’s AGM in Gold Coast, Australia, last May.

“It’s going to be a very good course for Guyana, especially for the teachers training the children for CSEC. It is also a basic programme to help us with the development plan for badminton in Guyana, because now the teachers will be assisting us to get up the players and then we get them out into the areas and the teams and clubs (where) we would want them to go,” Ramdhani asserted.
The Badminton Association, over the years, has been clamouring for the sport to be prominent in schools nationwide, and Ramdhani believes the hosting of the Shuttle Time Programme is a positive step in that direction.
Guyana is now the 106th country where the Shuttle Time Programme has been introduced.