Similar to most sports, badminton requires a lot from the players, both physically and mentally. For those who are not familiar, “Badminton is a co-ed sport, meaning guys and girls can play. There are three events which are singles, doubles, and mixed doubles. Singles is when [an athlete plays by themselves against another individual from the opposing team]. Doubles is when you have a partner of the same sex. Mixed doubles is when you have a partner of the opposite sex. As a team, we all play different events, and if we win our match then that counts as one point for our team,” explained Junior Arynn Augostino.

   Senior Vivian Chou explained, “We do a lot of conditioning. We run a lot to build stamina, and when we’re in the gym, we drill a lot to reinforce our consistency. Stamina is really important, because if you’re playing a harder opponent, usually it comes down to [who has the better] stamina. It’s a matter of who can keep up with the other [longer].”

   Augostino added, “For conditioning, we usually run ten laps around the whole school, and usually, we have practice from 3 p.m to 6:30 p.m. or from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.” She explained that Head Coach Jordana Barrios is very competitive and constantly pushes the team to be successful and play to the best of their abilities.

     In the game of badminton, a few assets that are very important to success are trust, communication, and overall team cohesiveness. Chou clearly explained, “[Trust] is extremely important, because if you don’t trust your partner, it’s really hard to play doubles efficiently. You have to know each other’s rotation along with their strengths and weaknesses.”

   Junior Subeom Kang stated that if players do not trust their partners, they are messing up their own game as well.

    Augostino explained that over the past seasons, competing side by side with one another and getting through hard practices together helped the team: “We excelled in terms of skill and learning how to communicate whenever we played.”

      “For this season, our division changed. It will be tough. We play against Serra, Madison, Patrick Henry, and La Jolla — they’re all really good schools, so I feel like this year is definitely more of a challenge,” explained Augostino. She continued, “Last year, our line up was mainly seniors. Since they graduated, we lost them. Now that they’re gone, we got a bunch of new rookies. So far, their progress is pretty good. [We will have to] train harder than last year, for sure.”

   Senior Chelsea Lugue said, “This year we’re actually really lacking in experienced players, especially boys. We only have about three boys on our team that are returners from last year. I think one of the things that we’ll struggle with is the amount of experienced players we have. We’re going to focus on varsity, and then we’ll have to choose some of the rookies to put on the line up and make sure to train them at our level. It’s going to be hard for them, but hopefully we can train hard enough to make it to CIF again.”