No sweeping victory...
11:48PM, October 22, 2006 - [ Permalink]
This weekend I participated in my first badminton tournament (tournoi de badminton Invitation en Outaouais 2006) with some of the folks whom I play badminton with at the Routhier Community Centre. We came up with the insidiously clever name, The T is not a side (you had to be there).
We had to learn the new rules, which I'm not overly impressed with, which were changed to make badminton more television-friendly for the Olympics.
Now, we play recreational badminton, which is fine and all, but it isn't competition-level playing. But, we figured we had a chance.
Tracey and I left home and met Crystal and Alex at the Tim Horton's near our place, then drove to the school arriving at 8:30 AM Saturday morning, changed, and listened to the speeches as we warmed up a bit. Shortly thereafter, we started to play. Tracey, who was there purely in a support capacity (thanks, babe!) took photos and made sure I was drinking water and eating food. She spent some time listening to the Chronicles of Narnia audiobook on the iPod.
When we weren't playing, we sat around chatting, watching our team members play as well as other teams. Some of the other teams were *explosively* fast, returning shots I never could.
The tournament progressed slowly - very slowly - to the point where the organizers changed how it was going to work, if they hadn't Mark estimated that we would finish around 10:00 PM.
At the end of what turned out to be our last round of games, we were told we were done for the day, although we had understood that there would be a consolation round for the two teams who didn't qualify to battle over the top of D - so we could fight it out to be the best of the worst.. This left us in an odd position - 5:00 PM, with ninety minutes to kill before the official dinner.
We discussed our options - everyone wanted to go have a shower, but weren't keen on driving all the way home, then coming back... So we went to (guess where) Patty Bolands Pub for dinner and drinks.
Overall, we lost all our first round of games (six sets of matches each best of three) against an A-level team (A is the highest, D the lowest), all our second round against a B-level, and all our C-level games. We did, however, win two games in the D-level in women's doubles (yay Crystal and Mel). Otherwise, we lost *all* our games, although a few were close.
On the brighter side, we were the only team there that had home-made fresh pumpkin pie (yay Mel!), home made naan bread and blueberry cookies (Yay Tracey!), hummus, cheese, and a collection of Fruit to Go that I'm a fan of.
On a whole, I had a great time. The Routhier crew is a good gang of people, and while getting relentlessly pounded by other teams *is* disheartening, we had a fun time of it and learned plenty.
Maybe next year we'll try again.
Maybe not.
