Badminton Club member serving. Photo by Rebecca Oliveira.
The badminton club meets every Friday from 7-10 pm at the Salemwood School. It has been around since the Salemwood School was first established in the year 2000. Before they actually formed the badminton club, one of the founding members Larry Lo explained that they were a part of the Asian Spectrum Organization, and they originally held their meets at the Lincoln School before it was torn down and became the Lincoln Garden.
They have 60 to 80 members in total, but not everyone who participates in the club meets every Friday so that the Salemwood gym wouldn’t get too overcrowded with people, since the badminton club also shares the Salemwood gym with a basketball team and the ping-pong team. The club has a “family atmosphere, that everybody is really friendly,” Lo says in describing the community of the badminton club. The club is open to not only students from Malden, but also to people around the Greater Boston Area.
Two members of the club, Shatrungai Singh and Vivek Thyagarajan, “usually warm-up first, play a warm-up game and then we play an actual game, but we don’t have a fixed schedule persay,” Singh states. “It’s pretty much up to the individual,” Thyagarajan elaborated. Members of the badminton club don’t have a fixed set of drills like most sport teams do, since the club is more of a recreational, free-for-all type of club. For people like Singh and Thyagarajan, who have been playing badminton since they were very young, the badminton club allows them to leisurely practice in a very welcoming community.
In the past, the club used to join other meets around the city to compete with other badminton teams. However, for the past two years the badminton club has joined other clubs for “interclub friendly matches,” Lo explained, where they would meet and compete against each other. The different clubs would only be versing each other for fun, as opposed to competing against each other for a championship.
A lot of the members enjoy participating in the club for for a variety of different reasons. For new members like Feng Chang, badminton is “unlike any other sport”, and not just because it’s fun to play. Chang felt that, “there is not that much a gap between beginner and someone who has more experience,” which makes it easier for him to play with other members on the team without feeling self-conscious about his lack of experience, and that in the game “you’re not defeated so easily.”
Another reason people like badminton is the fact that it’s a very intense and high speed sport, and a lot of the members appreciate how badminton is a good workout sport. Lo said that he liked the “intense” and “high speed” aspects of badminton, and he explained that badminton is technically an even faster paced sport than tennis. Thyagarajan appreciates how badminton is an “all-round” sport, that allows for him to “move [himself] out of the couch and moves all of [his] muscles.”
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