To many it would seem impossible for a one year old club to attract over one hundred people to one meet, but for junior Jerry Peng and the rest of the Badminton Club, it’s all in a day’s work.
Peng founded the club, which is sponsored by Ms. Wayerski, in December, 2015, after noticing a distinct gap in the market. “I wanted to spread the love of the sport, for people who don’t have time outside of school to commit to an actual extracurricular badminton… so I made the club technically during lunch so almost everyone has the opportunity to play,” he explained.
Freshman Ava Abtahi added, “I’m so glad that we have this team because it’s not really popular in other schools, so [it’s] a great start!”
One of the main attractions of the club is how easy it is to join, to play, and to have fun. “[It’s an] easy sport to get into,” Peng explained. Freshman Usama Abdelkarim agreed, elaborating, “The way that I learned to play was… playing with my neighbor … there were hardly any rules whatsoever, and we were just doing it for so long, and that’s how I got good. That’s all I did!”
However, this easy beginning does not detract at all from the possibilities of the sport. The team agreed: there’s no limit to how good you can get. Abdelkarim added, “The more we train with each other, the better we become.”
Unfortunately, while the RM gym is under construction, the club is out of a meeting place. In the meantime, the officers of the club are working hard to ensure that their members still get to play the sport they love. Peng elaborated, “We’re a club for the school as well but we also have a team for the school that competes against other schools. I’ve been working with B-CC’s and Churchill’s club presidents to organize weekend tournaments.”
While the team is still technically a club, the officers are attempting to mimic the way a varsity sport works. “We take these guys on the weekend to play against Churchill and B-CC… A game is 21 points and we play around 3 games per person in an official tournament and we add up the scores,” Peng explained. The team is tight-knit, constantly working to improve. “Some of us had to train with one another, so we know each other pretty well when it comes to technique and stuff like that,” Abdelkarim explained. “We played against Churchill one time and we won… which is really exciting,” Peng said.
The benefits of the Badminton Club are numerous, with both physical and social advantages. Freshman Thomas Sanders touted the physical merits, saying, “It gives a lot of people more opportunity to play different sports because badminton works on footwork… instincts… form.” In addition to these benefits, just having a place to go every Tuesday and Thursday at lunch is a great perk, and connects members to other people who love the sport. Sanders continued, “It gets people together, you make new friends…
[I’ve] never met a person in there with a bad attitude, and they always wanted to play badminton.”
