A recreational badminton team goes to a tournament.
2:15PM, October 29, 2008 - [ Permalink]
I'm a pretty avid badminton player, even though I don't take it too seriously. I've been playing since 2000 or 2001 (hard to nail it down exactly) at the Routhier Community Centre in the market area of Ottawa, and many of us have been playing together for years.
Two years ago, we entered a badminton tournament in Aylmer, and we got slaughtered, but we had a good time of it anyway.
We decided to go again, and take another whirl at it.
Our group doesn't take things too seriously - we could barely motivate to practice twice before the tournament.
I woke up at the completely unholy hour of 5:45 in the morning - pretty close to when I'm used to going to bed to give you an idea of just how wrong this is. I showered, puttered around, and headed off to Zak's with Tracey for breakfast, were I was reminded that their portion sizes are freakishly huge, and I smartly didn't clean my plate.
Mel met me at Zak's and she drove to the high school where the tournament was taking place. We changed into our badminton duds, and started warming up as the rest of our team showed up.
Hopefully, the organizers will work out something better than the PA system they were using as half the time we couldn't understand what they were saying.
Then the games began.
Playing against A-level teams could be pretty frustrating - if we were trying seriously, but obviously we weren't (hence the lack of practicing). That said, our ladies doubles (Crystal and Mel) came very close to winning against one of Ottawa U's teams.
Even though we're in this for fun, I get very self-conscious when I'm on the court at these competitions - I believe that I am the weakest player on our team, so I sometimes try a little too hard. Louie reminded me to relax and all was well.
Until our racquets clashed (my forehand smash to his back hand) and my Black Knight Rapier Pro died on the court, but fortunately, his racquet was fine. I ran off-court, and borrowed someone's racquet and got back on court, and continued the game, which we lost. I did get back into my groove, using other people's racquets, though. If your expectations are low enough, you can have an awful lot of fun.
At this point, I'd observe that nearly everyone we played against was pretty cool about not just clubbing us like baby platypuses. One team, however, we all felt was pretty unsportsman-like, which was unfortunate.
Our impressive streak streak of losses continued until we made it into D-level, which is where we pretty much belonged. We were eliminated, placing sixteenth of sixteen, which is roughly where I expected us to be. Looking back over the games, the biggest problem I had were the errors; net-serves, short serves, shots just out, etc.
Nonetheless, it was fun. Maybe next time we'll actually practice.
