Long-serving Smillie steps down
● Badminton Scotland chief proud to have put organisation ‘on the world stage’
Badminton Scotland’s Anne Smillie, the longest-serving chief executive in British sport, is stepping down after leading the organisation since 1990.
Having joined what was then the Scottish Badminton Union ten years earlier as an assistant administrator, stepping up to the roles of executive administrator then chief executive, Smillie established Badminton Scotland as one of the most professional and highly respected associations in the sport, with its world ranking improved from 29th to 15th.
Drawing on experience gained from the 1986 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh, where Scotland won a gold medal in men’s doubles, Smillie was instrumental in bringing nine major international championships to Scotland, culminating in last year’s staging of the World Championships, which Badminton World Federation officials said had “set the bar so high that it would be unreasonable to expect future hosts to reach it”.
Smillie was a founding member of the UK Sport Major Events steering committee in 2000, serving three years, and became the only woman on the BWF executive board when she became its chair of events in 2007 during a sixyear stint on the BWF Council.
In 2009, she was awarded the Emlyn Jones Award for “Outstanding Service to the Administration of Sport”.
Smillie said: “I have served Badminton Scotland to the best of my ability for the past 38 years and have decided that now is the right moment to pass the baton of leadership to a new chief executive.
“Helping put Badminton Scotland on to the world stage has been a source of great pride, but even more exciting has been witnessing the way Scottish talent has seized the opportunities provided, with appearances in World Championship finals by Imogen Bankier and Robert Blair, who have also been among those who have accrued an impressive haul of Commonwealth Games medals which was added to this year when Kirsty Gilmour became the first Scot to win individual singles medals at two Commonwealth Games.”