The Badminton Association of Zimbabwe is focused on strengthening their developmental structures for future stars in the sport.

The association’s president Chipo Zumburani said grassroots development is their top priority at the moment.

She said this last week in Harare during the Shuttle Time program, a project initiated by the World Badminton Federation to make the sport one of the most popular in schools.

“For us to talk of Olympics we need to be strong at grassroots level. We are focused on grassroots and now we have a number of primary schools playing.

“The cream will come out naturally when you got a good base,” she said.

Zumbarani added:

“The focus right now is to give every child in our country an opportunity to hold a badminton racket.

“This is in line with the World Federation vision,” she said.

She was pleased with the participation of more than 30 teachers from across the country during their program last week.

“We held a tutors course from Monday to Wednesday then launched the teachers' course on Thursday.

“The teachers' course was a platform to assess the tutors as well, on what they had learnt during their course.

“We had 12 tutors who followed the first part of the course and our instructor was Dajee Annirao from Mauritius,” said Zumburani.

Locally the sport has been fairly active on club level with the Eagle Wings annual tournament being one of the major calendar events.

The national team has also been participating in international competitions with the latest one being their appearance at the Thomas and Uber Cup African Preliminaries in 2016.

The country has also sent teams to the African Schools Badminton Championships in recent years.