In a day and age where even player fitness is monitored statistically, it should come as no surprise sports players and fans are very interested, and for different reasons, in understanding records and statistics associated with their sport in their general and matches in particular.
Badminton has been lagging rather behind when it comes to this aspect. There are very few databases which give out badminton statistics beyond the last few years and for a sport which has been played competitively for decades and for which there has been a federation since 1934, this is almost tragic.
The International Badminton Federation, which is now known as the Badminton World Federation, was formed that year but up-to-date records and historic achievements in badminton aren’t quite available beyond 1989.
That was the problem a software engineer Jens Christensen encountered when he kick-started his pet project, and a hobby, in the form of BadmintonStatistics.net.
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Who is Jens Christensen?
Jens Christensen is a badminton fan from Denmark who works in the software industry and possesses an insatiable appetite for sports statistics. Which is why when he found it difficult to get some of the records associated with badminton, he decided to build his own badminton statistics database, BadmintonStatistics.net.
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What is BadmintonStatistics.net?
BadmintonStatistics.net is a website which software guy Jens Christensen started as a result of not getting enough badminton statistics related information. The badminton records database was built by Christensen using information available online and by using his knowledge as a software guy to trawl this data from the Tournament Software website.
Over the time, Christensen has improved his website to give out tournament and player information from all the way back to 1989 which is the best by some distance as far as any badminton statistics software has gone so far.
Speaking to Indian news website, Scroll.in, Christensen noted he has been a fan of sports like baseball and ice hockey and these are sports which rely heavily on statistical data. Incidentally, Moneyball, a popular book and movie was based on the use of such data in baseball to help Oakland Athletics win the MLB title in the 2002 season.
And that led to a sense of frustration when badminton didn’t allow him that same luxury leading to Christensen spending some time daily in trying to bring a statistic website together.
What Records Does BadmintonStatistics.net Have?
It’s a badminton statistics website, which, at the time of writing, consists of tournament and player results, rankings and win-loss statistics for players going back all the way to 1989. This includes all categories of badminton including men’s and women’s singles and doubles and mixed doubles. It also includes hall of fame details.
What to Expect in the Future?
There’s a lot to come on the website but one of the most important aspects of badminton statistics is the head to head record between players. This gives an excellent perspective about how two players line up going into a match and juxtaposed with recent form for both, can give great insight on who starts favourite in the encounter.
Individual player pages, with individual record associated with those players is a big requirement too. At one glance all the statistical information about the player can be accurately found in this way without having to rely on unreliable sources otherwise.
Tournament winners of some of the age-old competition are obviously sought but what would also be very welcome are the exact draws in older badminton competitions with winners of each rounds, not just the tournament.
Player ranks along with a date-wise ranking for each on their player page will give the fans a chance to look at the change in their rankings quicker. Usage of graph here would make for a lot of sense like CoreTennis.net does with their yearly, player-wise player ranking graph. Check the image below showing Daniil Medvedev’s ranking over 2019.
Some of the other expected improvements are as follows:
- Statistical Tournaments Data (including average match lengths, points, games)
- Better Search Algorithm for Player Pages
- Rounds of Team Tournaments
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Challenges Faced by Christensen Developing BadmintonStatistics.net
It’s been a passion project for Jens Christensen obviously but things haven’t always been straightforward. Some of the challenges faced by Christensen have been mentioned below, and also give an indicator the kind of effort which has gone into the making of this database.
It’s a work in progress but as mentioned in the section above, there’s a lot to expect from BadmintonStatistics.net in the future. Which brings us back to the challenges faced.
It’s taken Christensen to get things in order. This hasn’t been an overnight project and needed him to take a break from his job to get things done.
The bigger problem he faced was to overcome the discrepancies in the available data. The Tournament Software had solid data over the past decade or so but before that there have been issues related to missing tournament data.
This is what Christensen had to say:
“BWF’s data covers most tournaments back to 1989, though before 2007 there are quite a lot of tournaments missing – even some very prominent ones such as All England 2002 and all Thomas/Uber/Sudirman Cups.”
“I am currently working on adding the missing tournaments to the database, but it can be very difficult to find the scores for the old tournaments.”
This has forced Christiensen to change this into an “open source project”, getting badminton fans to share score cards of the competitions found missing from the list.
You can follow BadmintonStatistics on Twitter here. Some brilliant tweets with regular and latest updates on badminton records there.