Last Tuesday was the day for my school region’s badminton area tournament. Since I was on the team I also competed at in the tournament, and I had a lot of fun. I didn’t get a chance to go last year, so I’ll be writing about it this year.
The tournament was held at a high school that was big enough for all of the school’s teams. There were quite a few teams at the meet. Some of them were a lot more well known than others, but they were the usual teams our school competed with for other sports. The way the tournament was set up was so that there was an A and B bracket for each type of pairing (male, female, and mixed). If you won against your first team you would move on, and if you lost you’d go down to the losers bracket. This way, each team had a chance to play at least twice.
My original parter I was supposed to play with just got better from a fever, so I was playing with one of the substitutes. However, I think it wasn’t too bad since I’ve played with him quite a few times before. We waited for quite a while before we played our first game which we won, but a lot of time was spent watching other teams. When we played our second game we lost and moved to the losers bracket. After playing our last game which we lost in the losers bracket, my partner and I thought that the team we played in the losers bracket was even better than the team we lost to in the main bracket.
Fortunately, we were able to play three games which is more than the minimum two, but I think that we definitely could’ve played more since we didn’t even lose by that much to the second team we played. There was one school that did really well since almost all of their players had extra practices and went to other badminton clubs while our team only had around four practices and some of our players didn’t really know how to play. One guy in mixed doubles was really good, so I asked my friend who was the best on our team how good he thought the guy was and my friend said he was probably the best player in the tournament. I think he was right though because he beat one team 21-0 in two sets, and also won a game where neither he or his partner smashed at all as a handicap. Although our team left before the tournament was over I wouldn’t be surprised at all if I found out that his team won.
Overall, I had a lot of fun playing at the tournament, but I think I could still improve a lot more if I practiced more. There were a lot of really good players there that were interesting to watch and learn from.