And so, another year gone already and it’s off to Nottingham for the 52^nd running of the Under 18 Inter County Tournament.  With a young team and lacking several of the stronger players of recent years, we had no great expectations other than not finishing in the bottom group.  After a tough start we had a great finish with a run of 5 matches undefeated, placing us 27^th of the 35 competing teams, only two places down on the 2016 result.  County Coach Rob Wetherell was pretty pleased with the overall performance, as were his assistants Ellie Roberts (recently qualified at Level 2) and David Murray.

The team was Abby Grogan, Anna Railton, Maddy Atkinson, Rachel Bogan and Sarah Bambrick; Alex Jay, Ashraf Alam, George Moran, Jamie Tinnion and Melvin Cherian.  Four of them were new to the ICT and this can be very daunting, given that the atmosphere is always very vibrant and noisy. (more…)

Our Under 18 team have just returned from Nottingham where the 52nd Inter County Tournament took place in the run-up to Easter.  The team travelled back, buoyed by their success…

The Anglo-Scottish League event for Under 15s took place this weekend at Tyneside Badminton Centre, with six teams from north and south of the border competing.  Yorkshire brought a strong team and took the honours with their 12-3 win over Lothian in the deciding match.  Northumberland, with a very young and inexperienced team, found the going quite tough but still produced some encouraging performances on the way to finishing in fifth place, just being pipped by Cumbria. (more…)

Northumberland’s U17 team has just been down to Sheffield for the second round of the North Midway.  As there was a late team withdrawal from this round, the format of the day was set to be a round robin of six counties.   Manager Lizzie Jerdan’s report follows and documents what turned into a superb achievement for the county’s team. (more…)

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Emily Harrison and Ashraf Alam came home from the Durham U19 Silver tournament on 4th February laden with three trophies between them. Emily partnered with Beth Speechley of Yorkshire, and…

This tournament, which is often the first team event for our young players, was held last weekend at TBC.  Northumberland’s team, which was relatively inexperienced in comparison to the strong counties of Lothian and Yorkshire, fought hard but found the going tough.  They were also carrying the disadvantage of having to concede matches as the team were short of girls and had to field overage players. (more…)

We had four age group junior tournaments last weekend, with a Silver at Under 16 and Bronze events at Under 18, Under 14 and Under 12.  The tournaments went very…

Our young and very inexperienced Under 14 team bounced back from a tough opening defeat to Yorkshire by sharing the spoils with Lancashire 2.  Playing for the first time on…