Cougars fielding strong badminton teams

Justin Seward
Times Reporter

 

The Crowther Memorial Junior High School Cougars badminton teams concluded their tryouts, with their singles and doubles playdowns earlier this week and the final roster announcements coming next week.
Between 180 to 200 kids tried out for badminton this year, and vying for a spot on the three teams, some players that didn’t make it last year won’t make it this year because of the stronger ones that signed up.
Crowther’s badminton director, Brad Huntley, said that with a large badminton team cuts can become fairly obvious with some players but difficult to make with others, because in the end they are close in skill development, and that is where the coaches put it in the kids’ hands to challenge each other.
“Our playdowns are like a mini-tournament,” said Huntley. “Each grade level coach does their cuts, their own style and it’s a little different. The first round of cuts is coach related. We do playdown tournament singles … typically we look at their records in their little tournaments to see who should move on.”
Once the roster is trimmed to more manageable numbers, the players may not play through the full 21 points, but they’ll play to 15 points.
“Things are going well,” said Huntley. “It’s awesome. It makes having to cut kids not a fun process because you want to let them all play. The rules have changed as of a few years ago where we can actually send three entries for Grade 7, 8 and 9, where it used to be three for Grade 9 and two for Grade 7s and 8s. We can have a bigger team than we used to, so that helps because in our divisions right now, we send the largest badminton by far to counties.”
The school does fairly well at counties but are in tough at zones, where they’re up against specialized badminton players, which is significant for a two-month season.