Stefan has a passion for sport, entrepreneurship and technology (www.ljutzkanov.com). He believes in dual careers for athletes and coaches, and part of his research has been in this direction.
He is a Lead-researcher in variety of projects related to Badminton and Sports (www.sporterp.co.uk) and a Visiting Fellow in high performance coaching, technology and entrepreneurship Loughborough University.
He started playing badminton in Bulgaria, Veliko Tarnovo. At 13, he got his first national medal, later on becoming a national champion in doubles and mix (U19) and 2nd in singles (U19) and 2nd in doubles at senior men's level. He has been a Balkan champion in singles, in doubles (with Vladimir Metodiev) and in mixed doubles (with Petya Nedelcheva).
He started coaching at 16 with his first group of young, aspiring athletes. He soon discovered that his passion for coaching was much stronger than his passion for personal badminton success as a player. He had the opportunity to start the first professional club in Bulgaria in 2001, going on to win the national team championships and many more international titles across Europe.
During his journey at the time, he met a lot of great international coaches (including Kenneth Larsen (DEN), Bjarne Nielsen (DEN), Andy Wood (ENG) and more), which helped his decision to move to Denmark to pursue the highest international coaching level at the time (DBF1, DIF, EBU1). At the same time, he started coaching in smaller clubs (Saeby (DEN)) as well as VBK junior club, where he met coaches such as Morten Bjergen (DEN), Thomas Engholm (DEN) and more. Morten was working on the development of the Miniton system with Kasper Soerensen (DEN) at the time.
His coaching journey continued in Hojberg (Aarhus areas, DEN), where he started an international badminton development academy with some local and international talents. Subsequently, he became a sporting director at the ESG Badminton Club (at the time, the 5th biggest club in Denmark), where he successfully developed the senior teams to higher levels of success.
Due to his personal growth and coaching journey, he was invited to become the head coach for the Junior National Centre in Hamburg, Germany. At the time, he was responsible for Yvon Lee, Bjarne Geiss, Stine Kuespert, Emma Moszcyznski, and Matthias Kicklitz. In addition, he became responsible for the U15 national selection as part of the national coaching team.
Growing further, he took the challenge to develop the national centre in Kaiserslautern (Germany), which had lost national certification and recognition at the time. It took two years to build it back, attracting talent with him and making a coaching team capable of handling the challenge further. As the local and national federation (BVRP) needed a systemised development plan, he introduced the initial concept of Miniton and brought Morten Bjergen to support the development. This is where the Miniton Plus and Teknika Plus were born as concepts. The names were kept to recognise the acknowledgement and work of Morten Bjergen (who later passed away). However, they are much further from the original Miniton and Teknika concepts. In recognition of the influence of Morten, Badmintoo.com has dedicated 10% of the profits to keep in a fund in the name of Morten for a scholarship named after him..
Stefan realised that changing the status quo in the development of badminton was a much bigger task than what he previously perceived. This is why he chose to take it further and look for a place where he can get the extra support to pursue this challenge. Thanks to Jacob Hoi, who at the time was a national head coach in England, he was introduced to Prof. Mark King and Loughborough University. It became clear that Loughborough University was where such a challenge could be developed, and after a few years, Stefan joined the University as a research student (PhD).
Badmintoo as a concept had existed before; however, this took it to an entirely new level, introducing some of the world's best academics, coaches and researchers, so Badmintoo.com was born.
Stefan is also pursuing his PhD and is looking for further PhD support from other ambitious coaches, players and academics passionate about badminton.
Please, feel free to contact Stefan at [email protected].