Badminton Team’s 10K a day to raise funds for first ever kit
Whether they walked, swam, cycled or ran – GCU’s Badminton Team smashed their 10K a day challenge to raise money to buy their first ever official kit.
Since returning to campus and reopening memberships in September after 17 months of not training due to Covid-19, the team secured sponsorship from Revolution Glasgow and have completed a 10K a day challenge to raise money to buy brand new kit.
Physiotherapy student and club captain Rachel Mathers explained the group’s motivation to raise money to kit out their players.
She said; “As far as I can remember, Badminton has never had a kit.
A couple of years ago we spoke about getting one but obviously covid happened and it just got put on the backburner.
Right before lockdown, we won The Scottish Conference Cup so we’ve been really looking forward to competitions starting back up again.”
The committee decided we would do some sort of fundraiser to get the money for kits because we didn’t want the members to have to pay for one because they are quite expensive.
Rachel added; “It was agreed that since we’re a sports team our fundraiser should be somewhat fitness related - so we eventually came to the decision of doing 10K a day for a week.
Participants could walk it, run it, cycle it, swim it, whatever the team members getting involved wanted to do!”.
After working out how much the team would need to buy the kits, Rachel was delighted that they managed to hit their target and more.
She said; “We put up a target of £650 and by the end of it we raised £700.
Past members even ended up getting involved - our previous captain, he got involved in completing 10K a day - I think everyone just wanted to help the team out.”
Proud captain Rachel explained what getting this kit would mean for the team.
She said; “We’re really proud of what our team has accomplished so far.
We won a cup that – we were sitting in lower divisions going for it – so we beat teams above us.
We won our league undefeated in all the games we played, we’ve done really well at other Scottish universities in previous years and so we’re just really proud to play for our team.”
Rachel added; “Whenever we’ve played other teams they’ve always had a kit and it’s something we never had.
Previously we would just tell everyone to wear red or wear blue but now we’re going to have this official GCU kit that we can show up in.”
The team have hit the ground running this Trimester and Rachel reiterated how keen they are to get back to competing.
She said; “We’re just so excited – we’ve already done so much more than we’ve done in previous years.
We’ve got our team training night in place which is nice, and a lot more socials planned like Christmas nights out and things like that.
I think the year out has just hyped us up – it’s made us realise we’ve lost a year so we need to make this year back bigger than ever and do more than we’ve ever done before.”
Rachel added; “We also want everyone that donated to know that we massively appreciate it and it means so much to all of us”.
Keep up to date with the GCU Badminton Team on Facebook.
By Rebecca Meechan
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