Badminton Drills for High School

In high school, you don’t often have as many resources like clubs or national teams. The most notable things that high school badminton lack are shuttles, experienced or skilled coaches, and time to train. While this isn’t always the case, it happens most of the time. That’s why we need badminton drills that work for high school or any type of school to be honest.

Whether you are a teacher becoming a coach for the school’s badminton team, a high school student preparing for tryouts and tournaments, here are some badminton drills for high school.

Simple Drills

In this article, I am going to focus on drills that only use one shuttle, does not require coaches to feed, and maximize the practice between all players in the least amount of time. There are some simple drills that all high schoolers should do for practicing consistency shots. The first one being clears.

Clears are one of the greatest shots because they’re so easy and they’re foundations to many other shots. This simple drill just involves two people on a half court clearing to each other. Yep, that’s it. Make sure players have the proper swing when clearing and try to aim for high clears that reach the back line (of course the school roof can be a problem). Clearing is a great warm-up drill as well.

The next drill is for drops, smashes, lifts, blocks, and net shots. Though you won’t be practicing all these shots at the same time, you will be practicing many of these in conjunction. The drill is one person lifts, the other person then smashes or drop shots, then the first person blocks or net shots respectively, and then the other person lifts and repeat. This drill should be done on a half court as well.

The next type of shot high schoolers can practice is driving. Like the clears, this one is simple as well. Just drive to each other! If you and your partner are skilled enough, you can add in variations where one of you would be more on the offensive and the other on defense. The one on the offense would be hitting downwards almost like a smash and the one on the defense would just hit it back over and over again. Like the other drills, this should be done on a half court as well.

These are great drills for practicing consistency and could also act as a warm-up.

More Complex Drills

Doing only the simple drills won’t get you that far though, there are patterns which make it easy. If the high school players can do the simple drills comfortably, doing these drills should be okay as well. Complex drills involve more shots and different patterns so it allows players to play shots in a more game-like situation.

The first drill I’m going to talk about is the clear, clear, smash or drop drill. This drill is great for improving overall offensive play. Here’s how it goes. Person A high serves, person B clears, person A clears, person B clears again, and person A also clears. Then person B would smash or drop and A would block or net shot. Finally, B lifts and it restarts. In this drill make sure players move back to middle after each shot.

The next drill I want to talk about is the smash, drive, lift. Person A would start off with a high serve once again, then person B is going to smash. Person A should drive block (play a drive off of the smash) the smash and person B should follow up with a drive and then person A would lift. Repeat. This drill is great for improving offensive play for whoever is smashing and defense for whoever is lifting. It is also a great drill that shows off what happens in doubles most of the time; smashes and drives. Of course after a few minutes, the players should switch roles.

There are definitely more drills you can try but those are some great drills to help you improve.

Singles

Getting into the high school badminton team likely means that they give you positions such as singles, doubles, and mixed doubles. If you are a singles player, here’s how you can practice.

In this article, I’m going to focus on 2 on 1 drills, attack and defense. 2 on 1 drills are great because it allows for maximum practice for the singles player without draining the 2 people too much.

First, let’s start off with defense. In this drill, we want the 2 players to be front and back. The person at the back will do most of the work and is allowed to play any shot. The player at the front should play net shots, lifts, and the occasional net kill. Don’t play net kills too much because it ruins the practice by not being able to push the defender’s stamina. Here the singles player can’t play drops, smashes and drives unless it is a block.

For attack, the doubles pair should be side-to-side and now they’re like the singles player in defense; they can’t drop, smash or drive. The singles player on the other hand can play any shot and the goal is to win the rally.

One thing to note about these two drills is that everyone is using singles lines, meaning the first sideline and the very far back line. This is because this drill puts emphasis on the singles player, not the doubles.

Doubles

With doubles and mixed doubles, we’re going to do a drill very similar to the drills I mentioned in singles. Once again we’re going to focus on attack and defense except this time it’s 2 on 2.

In this drill you want one doubles pair to be front and back and the other to be side-to-side. Yep, you guessed it, the front and back doubles pair will be attacking and the side-to-side pair will be defense. Like the singles drills, the defenders can’t drop and smash while the attackers can make any shots.

And with that, those are the drills I recommend for high school!

Conclusion

While you were reading, you may have been wondering why I didn’t include footwork drills. For footwork, there are no differences between high school drills and regular footwork drills so you can check out my article, Drills and Exercises for Improving Footwork. If you are a high school badminton team coach, generally you want to build a schedule for the training. If you have a 1-hour time limit, try to incorporate simple drills into the warm-up, approximately 10 minutes, and then doing complex drills or splitting up singles and doubles into their drills for 20 minutes. Then have players play each other for the rest of the time. I have an article, Badminton Warm-Up – Exercises to Prevent Injuries for more information on warming up.

There are also plenty more badminton tips, skills, drills and others on this site!

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below and as always good luck in your games and have a great day!