With basketball over and track and field not yet started, it’s badminton’s time to shine.
At R.F. Staples, the badminton team gearing up for the April 14 conference tournament in Westlock consists of 33 athletes, said coach Jon Radke.
The team has already been practising for about a month, he said, and has its sights set on being the best in a week’s time.
“We want to be the school that sends the most players to zones,” Radke said.
“That’s what all schools want.”
In the past few years, he’s seen the school’s doubles teams steadily improve. Lately they’ve been earning silver medals at the conference tournament; they need to win gold to advance to zones.
On the singles’ side, athletes finishing first or second get to move on to zones.
Despite seeing improvements over the years, Radke said it’s always difficult to predict just how well the school will do year over year.
“That’s the hard thing, you never know what you’re going to get from the other schools,” he said.
“There are categories where we’re strong and so are other schools.”
At St. Mary, the senior high team attending the conference tournament consists of only two players — a mixed doubles team, said coach Darcy Romanuik.
Both players played last year at Grade 11s, he said, so they’re an “experienced team.”
But in order to have success on April 14, they’ll have to keep putting in practice time and get more repetitions to be at their best on tournament day.
How they will ultimately do is hard to gauge, Romanuik said, as he doesn’t know the level of competition that will be at the tournament.
Badminton at St. Mary suffers from both timing and school size, he said.
The sport falls right between the end of basketball and the start of track and field, so many athletes choose to take a break instead of playing another sport.
Add in the fact with a small school the same athletes play virtually every sport, and there’s a limited number of available players who choose to pick up a racket.
Romanuik said he has a lot of promise at the Grade 9 level, but it’s only a matter of getting those players to come out.
