New world ranking list for junior players

Posted by Lucas Liau Top News 12:54 PM

PETALING JAYA: Malaysian juniors will be taking part in more international tournaments this year following the Badminton World Federation’s (BWF) move to introduce a junior world ranking system.
In fact, the BWF have introduced two new ranking systems for this year – one for the juniors and another for the nations.
Currently, the world body have an individual world rankings for players based on all level of tournaments on their calendar.
The BWF also have a Super Series ranking system based only on their 12-leg Super Series events.

The introduction of the junior rankings is to facilitate the qualification of shuttlers for the Youth Olympic Games, which was introduced by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) last year.
Without a proper ranking system for the juniors, the BWF had to use their World Junior Championships as one of the qualifying tournaments for the inaugural Youth Olympics.
This year, though, all junior tournaments sanctioned by BWF will offer ranking points.
Once established, the qualifiers for the Youth Olympics will be based on this new ranking list.
This will also prevent discrepancy and confusion whenever seedings for players are carried out for the Asian and World junior championships. With tangible world junior rankings, there is no room for cheating in determining the seeding of players.
Badminton Association of Malaysia (BAM) secretary Ng Chin Chai said that they wanted their juniors to establish good rankings.
“We have already informed our coaches at the Bukit Jalil Sports School (BJSS) to let their shuttlers compete in more tournaments this year. This is part of our long-term plan to strengthen our junior programmes,” he said.
Meanwhile, based on the BWF’s world rankings released on Dec 27, the top three badminton nations are China, South Korea and Malaysia.