Badminton Doubles Attack Tactics - Introduction of Double Rotation 1

Just by looking at the court, the number of persons available and the fact the goal in Badminton attack is to play for the net player, so that he/she can actually score with a direct point or forced error from the opponent, there are 4 possible attack formations possible:

- inline (= tunnel attack)

- classic (= indo attack)

- side-by-side (= cross covering)

- wedge (= side-by-side with a full net player).

Of course these systems cannot be seen steril devided from each other, there are both grey areas were the move fluently from one into the other system, as well as situation where a favorite system of a player or pair is changed due to different reasons (e.g. antizipation, fatigue, tactical, ...) and of course a mix of these are used for different sitations as well as in disguise as in pretending that covering but actually going for another one.

All of these systems have their raison d'etre - for certains individuals with different strength and skillsets, in a certains discipline, against certain apponents and/or in special situations. In this artcile we are looking at the side-by-side system and a possible introduction via using multi shuttle and later on coaches live shuttle feeding.

For the coach two main things are very important:

a) the ability to feed fast with accuracy especially when it comes to hard flat and close net feeding

b) feeding is just a tool, it is not coaching: you must be able to coach while feeding goes on simultaniously and automatically. Many often things that fast feeding equals good coaching, which is not the case, but beeing able to feed at high speed is one tool of many of a good coach.

Introduation of Side-by-Sidy-Attack:

There are many possible steps and it is important to adapt the steps to your players and their behaviour on court.

First: start with get the players used to cover the width of the court, that means mid and back court while feeding hard drives and high clear. Both players should be ready in midcourt and move agressivly to the backcourt and back to midcourt.

Introduction - covering side-by-side midcourt and backcourt only:

Besides to already getting to know the advantage (= on high clears and hard defense from the opponent, the court is pretty much coverd) you also have the players ready to be balanced in midcourt - a typical automatism that is not always what we are looking for is to follow blindly to the net after a hard midcourt game:

Mistake Example - not balanced in midcourt /  blind follow up to the net:

We are looking more for a balance in midcourt and pressuring the opponent step by step - unless there is a real chance to go in at the front court and attack as well as afterwards cover at the net. In that situation it is crucial for the other player to get into a good backcourt position, as his/her partner ist than at the net:

Moving without the shuttle - backcourt player's first step:

In this position the backcourt player has then the responsibility for the whole backcourt as well as the ipen gap in midcourt. Depending on the level is the distance between both players and to the net. When we make this sure, we have pretty much all situation covered:

Full rotation with net covering:

At higher speed it looks like that:

Full speed rotation:

When we went through these progressions, we need to advance - one possible step forward you will find in the second article.

Diemo Ruhnow

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About the author:

Diemo Ruhnow is currently working as Head National Coach Doubles for the German Badminton Federation. In his free time he writes for his websites http://www.badminton-training.com (English), http://www.badminton-training.de (German) and other Badminton journals