You've been invited to, and accepted the offer, to attend a Taster Session. You'll probably be a little nervous, and curious as to what to expect.

Perhaps we can provide you with a little insight, to make your induction as enjoyable and informative as possible.

• Upon arrival, you will be greeted by one of the committee members, who firstly will introduce you to the attending members of the committee, consisting of Steve, Ali, Anne-Marie and Dan.

• You will be invited to join one of the courts for a warm up and starting game.  At this stage, we avoid bombarding you with everyone's names but your colleagues on court will introduce themselves to you.

• At the end of this first game, Steve will provide you with a short Health & Safety induction, and then a little background about the group, its history and its membership.

• For the remainder of the session, you will take part in a number of games,which will provide you with an overview of how we manage the session and the processes we utilise to do just that.

• By the end of the session, we generally will provide you with feedback from the committee informing you of the status of your application. If successful, we leave the decision to you as to whether you progress with your membership but there is no obligatiion to join if you decide our group doesn't suit your needs.

Our weekly sessions start at 7pm every Tuesday. Upon arrival, players are encouraged to join any of the 4 courts with vacant space, for a gentle warm up/ practice, before commencing with an inaugural game, to get their evening underway.

Meanwhile, a member of the committee will be planning the next set of games using our Player Allocation System, which is in the form of a large whiteboard. All players have their own individual magnetic name badge, and the main objective for us is to create matched games, as much as is practical. These games can be mixed doubles, all male or all female.

We also prefer to mix players so you don't repeatedly play with the same person more than once, but this is not guaranteed. In the event that this happens, most of our members will happily repeat a partnership if required but we do offer the option for them to play with an alternative partner.

During the session, you may find yourself sitting at the side-lines for a short period, but this is merely to help us organise the games and as a rule, if you're in this situation, we will usually schedule you into a game as a priority. Rest breaks will usually only last a maximum of 10 minutes and are often less than this.

At the end of the session, all players vacate the courts by 9pm, to enable set up for the next  activity. And we can all look forward to next week, when we do this all again.

Back in 2019, when the HSB, then just Hinton Badminton, was still establishing itself as a local community interest group, we found ourselves without a venue for 1 particular evening. So we decided to have a night out instead at one of the local curry houses. As I recall, we only had about 15 members at the time, but even so, 13 of us agreed to meet up that night and enjoyed a wonderful evening of food, conversation and company. 

Enjoyable as it was, the evening in reality was an awakening for us as a group, as it made us aware that what we were creating wasn't just about getting people together to play Badminton regularly; it was also about friendship, community and sociability. 

Over the years, we've promoted these factors as part of our core ethos and worked hard to build a commitment to our membership to not just provide but nurture our community to thrive and be so much more. More recently, within the last couple of years, we settled on our current name of Hinton Social Badminton. One of the main reasons is that we consider ourselves very much as a social, and indeed sociable community. Whilst we do still promote a certain amount of competitiveness during our sessions, we prefer to focus more on our objectives, which consist of enjoyable activity and fellowship. 

And part of the drive to ensure that we continue to offer these purposes to our members was when we restarted our Social Events Calendar in 2024, after a couple of years break, mainly instigated by the Covid Pandemic. Our wonderful committee work tirelessly behind the scenes to organise some incredible activities for our members to be able to enjoy. And just as importantly, to enable them to strengthen their relationships within the network, a factor which can be quite difficult during a busy Badminton session..