the impending debut of para badminton at the tokyo 2020 paralympic games has inspired players like jack shepard and kristin combs on court shepard and coombs are fierce opponents and doubles partners off court they are best friends and training partners chasing a common goal the paralympic dream i've always been really sporty swim tennis table tennis i played and then it was just seemed to be the right one through the dsa the door sports association there sort of helped us all get into sports when i was a younger age and then yeah badminton just came along it got into the uh the power side of it the ss6 category and then it's just gone from there so that was 2008 was my first international now it's 2018. so yeah 10 years on still going well i started playing when i was 10 then i played my first international in 2013 at the world championship progressed on from there and now i'm 20 so 10 years maybe so currently i'm world champion and world number one for men's singles and i'm world number one for men's doubles as well [Music] so the day that i found out that para badminton was a paralympic sport it was fantastic it was an amazing feeling know that i'd be able to achieve a dream so a dream of mine from being a young child to go to a paralympics because i've loved sports since i was a young child and loved badminton so to find out that badminton was a paralympic sport moving forward to 2020 was an absolutely amazing day to know that i'd be able to achieve a dream um world number two in singles and world number one in doubles and it's been really hard because we've only recently got our funding from uk sport because badminton wasn't about paralympic sports obviously they won't fund anything until it's that so yeah those you know six years before have been even before you know it's been pretty full on you know having to work as well as train as much as i could maybe it wasn't full-time then but now with the funding it's amazing we can literally monday to friday and it's a job now it's a dream come true to get to world number one i have had to work really hard it's took lots of hours in training lots of hard work over and over again practice practice practice tournament after tournament to get the ranking points and the last year has just been incredible uh winning my first international in japan and then from there i was hot on kristen's heels so we're only a few points behind him and then went to win spain so that made that made sure i was world number one so it was really good to get to that stage but it just took loads of hard work lots of training and lots of good performance as well on court [Music] jack yeah we're great friends we've known each other for ages and it's now it's amazing because we're going along together sort of things we both train in sheffield together and we're both really good friends we're both just as competitive as each other and at the moment we're in a lot of finals against each other as well as the doubles obviously so it's usually on the sunday we've got a singles final first and then we have a doubles final afterwards so it's quite interesting sometimes so kristen is a mad doubles partner and opponent we train together every day myself and kristen it's a pretty good friendship that we've got we've been friends since we're young children offcoat is a really friendly funny guy we get on really well we have great banter and that off court and he's always there for you if you need or anything so he's a great guy as well [Music] my goals are to go to the paralympics and to win a medal so my ultimate goal is to make it to the paralympics uh so tokyo 2020 i'm only 20 now so i'd like to probably do more than one paralympics maybe two maybe three we just have to see what keeps going but my goal is to get to a paralympics