Thank you for your interest in Goslings London Badminton Club.

On 25th July many leisure centres across the country will be re-opening their doors after months of lockdown. Despite this, we are sad to report that our centres will not be allowing any badminton events to take place in their sports halls for the foreseeable future due to their other commitments and plans. We are keeping in regular contact with the management to see when we can return and we are hoping this will be very soon. We will continue to work with Badminton England and Out for Sport to find ways to keep people active during this time for their health and wellbeing.

Please do review this site for updated information. We thank you for your patience and hope to have you join us soon.

Goslings Committee

In keeping with tradition from previous years, today a bunch of us would’ve dressed up and headed down to join our Goslings family members to march through this diverse City in the annual Pride in London Parade. We would be laughing, waving at the crowd and breathing in the vibrancy that would be in the air. We would be celebrating with others for our rights as a community in this part of the world and remembering our heroes, past and present, who helped us get here. We would be proud to stand with the family we’ve made in our inclusive and diverse badminton club, Goslings, holding hands and showing our love for one another to those around us.

Today whilst we can’t celebrate together, physically let’s wave that rainbow flag loud and proud for who we are and what we’ve achieved. To keep the love alive, some of us put together a short video to wish you a very Happy Pride season (see below).

Also, at 12pm Pride in London took over the Piccadilly Lights. Goslings London featured at 15.48.

https://youtu.be/Rg1-rTtN4oA

Enjoy your Pride weekend and let’s remain ready to continue this journey for equality.

To all of you from your Committee, we wish you a fantastic Pride! ?️‍??

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CB70X4EFBkg/?igshid=o7hnachwn9i3

We’re pleased to confirm that this year’s Summer Tournament, AGM and Party will take place on Saturday 14 July 2018.

Tournament is standard format, i.e. people play with partners of similar ability – either entering together if you know who you want to play with, or matched with a blind date if you don’t.

Tournament will run from 10.30am-6pm at CitySport, as last year. AGM and Party will follow, exact timings and location tbc.

Please note that the tournament and AGM are for Goslings members only, but guest tickets for the Party will be available to purchase.

We’re still pinning down some elements of the evening, and will email and post full details and how to book as soon as possible – next weekend (19/20 May) all being well.

Today is the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia – a day of reflection of the journey we the LGBT+ community have made and remember the lives lost along the way; stay determined for the struggles and the battles that exist and are yet to come; celebrate the number of LGBT+ people who can now live in freedom and be themselves, fully.

Goslings stands in solidarity to bring about a better future for our LGBT+ family everywhere.

For more information, please visit http://dayagainsthomophobia.org/

Hello!

I hope you’ve had a good month! It’s been a memorable one. There were a number of Goslings accomplishments to celebrate so let’s report back to you on these.

This month we launched our much anticipated session in Elephant & Castle. Your Committee worked hard to establish this weekly session to a) manage increasing demand, especially on Thursdays and b) to venture in to South London. So far this night has been a success with numbers reaching over 30 players every Friday so far. The first night tied in nicely with our second social event of the year. Thanks to Neil, Alan and Michael for their efforts. No doubt we will make this night a regular success but for now we’re monitoring numbers before committing to this being a permanent fixture. But so far so good, and we’ve noticed Thursday numbers have gone back to manageable levels. We’d also encourage some of you to try out other sessions including Monday and Wednesday. We are aware that some wish to know their grading before this happens so feel free to ask a Committee member if you are unsure; one of us would be happy to let you know. We are exploring coaching options as we really want to support players progress to the next level. But as you can imagine this involves negotiating and planning so please bear with us.

April brought a lot of achievements for our members competing abroad from Amsterdam to Tours in France. Looks like many of you had a fun time and came away having given your personal best. And there are lots more of these to come in the year with Prague taking place this very weekend! Best of luck to those going. Prague is a well organised event in a beautiful city and no doubt you will have a great time.

Our very own international tournament is coming along nicely. Some places have been taken up by international participants. The organising committee is working hard with comms and getting other important matters sorted too from catering to venue hire for the social events. We aim to open registration for Goslings and other London Clubs and players on 6th June.

In the coming weeks we are also going to open our registration for our annual summer fun tournament. It’ll take place on 14th July in London and will accommodate 72 players. We plan on opening registration this month so look out for that. The games will be followed by our annual AGM where you will have a chance to hear from your Committee as to what we have been up to and hold us to account on our finances and other matters. We’re securing a venue that will provide food and drink. So more on that this coming month.

This month a small group of us represented Goslings at the annual Sports Fair at Southbank University. There were hundreds of people who attended this to see and speak to reps from many sports clubs from swimming, cycling to football and volleyball. We attracted many interested individuals and were complimented on having a welcoming and diverse team of people. A couple even said they had read about us after reading the brilliant article on our Nigel about his time at Goslings. Thank you to Andy, Bal, Lucy and Russell for being there and getting so many people to sign up, and to Lex for helping us set up and to Sarah for the photos. Your Committee encourage you to try other sports and we will send out information as these come to our notice.

We say a sad goodbye to Alister Morris. Alister has been on the Committee for some years helping Nat out on Wednesdays. He had moved down to London for work and returns up north for another job. We wish him the very best and thank him for his efforts. We’ll miss his support and his great wit and laughter. His departure adds to the number of opportunities for you to come and support a Committee member run a session. If you would like to do so, you must be a regular attendee of that session with time and energy to work with the Committee member to better support them and help run it; you will also be required to attend the odd Committee meeting, which take place quarterly. If you are interested please let Ubaid know by email and the Committee will review your application and come back to you. The sessional vacancies are: Monday (one vacancy), Wednesday (one vacancy), Thursday (two vacancies) and Sunday (one vacancy).

We end with some notes on the Thursday Member of the Month. Our April MoM award went to Sean Giles. We celebrated his continued enthusiasm and development of skills. He’s also just joined the Thursday door rota. He had moved to London and wanted to take up badminton again as well as make new friends – Goslings appealed to his needs. He says: It’s “been the best thing I’ve done in the last 2 years. Not only has just my badminton ‘slowly improved’ but I can genuinely say I’ve already met some friends for life.” His advice to those thinking of giving badminton a go is: “Don’t be nervous about joining! Everyone is super friendly and willing to help with all your badminton woes.” Thanks Sean and well done again.

So onwards to May when here’s hoping the weather will improve and we can enjoy the warmth and sunshine! Wishing you a great bank holiday weekend!

Your Goslings Committee

Thank you to all those who joined Members Only Night on Thursday.

Congratulations to the BLUE team who were were victorious ?

Next Thursday is open tonight and we will announce Thursday Member of the Month. Nominations can be sent via email to Thursday.badminton@goslingslondon.com

Have a great weekend!

Dear All

The final Thursday session of April is tomorrow and that means members only night.

The format will be the classic “Red vs Blue”. Players will be split into two teams and each game will have a pair from the Red team play against a pair from the Blue team. The winning pair of each game will get 2 points and the losing team will get zero points, except if the losing team has a score of 15 or above in which case they will get 1 point.

The winning team will be the team with the highest overall score at exactly 21:58!

Teams will be decided on the day and balanced based on badminton ability.

This is for members only. Players are asked to arrive before 19:20 so the teams can be chosen.

See you on Thursday!

Michael, Lucy and Ubaid ?

Thank you to every single one of you who showed up and made tonight a fantastic success. We took South London by storm! Not only did we have a very high turnout and awesome breathtaking games, the social was a great way of finishing off the evening and the week.

Big thanks firstly to Alan and Neil for making sure the session ran smoothly and secondly to Michael for organising a brilliant social in a nice convenient location. Pics to follow.

Wishing you all a super weekend. See you all next week