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Today after work I went back to my university to play in the school badminton club. I’m currently working co-op right now, but my work place isn’t too far from my university so going back there doesn’t take too long. I actually arrived early and was surprised when the gym was empty. Turns out the session started at 5:30 but I thought it started at 5:00, so I walked a long way to find a computer to check whether if the gym night was today or not.
After confirming the session was today, I went to the gym and started playing. The first game I was paired up with a guy that I knew was quite skilled, and I thought we would beat our opponents. Unfortunately, my prediction didn’t quite come true as both of us were rusty out of the gate and fell behind quickly. There were several swat opportunities at the beginning, but I hit all of them into the net. Our opponents had us in a 19-15 stranglehold, but suddenly we sprung to life and scored five straight points to take the lead 20-19. I thought we were going to get our big come-back win, but we made some mistakes and ended up losing 20-22.
The second game was more or less the same as the first one (although my partners and opponents were different). We fell behind by a lot but managed to make it respectable, bowing out 15-21. At that point I decided to switch to another racket to see if things will get better, and surprisingly it did. The third game was an older guy (not a student) and me against a father-son team. I’ve played the father-son team before and they can be hard to deal with, but this is wasn’t one of those times. My team dominated from the start, and I was swatting birds in the front court left and right while my partner was controlling the pace with his drop shots. I think our opponents were surprised that my hits suddenly got faster and never recovered. The final score was 21-10. Our opponents weren’t too pleased with the loss so we decided to have a rematch. This game was a bit closer but my team led throughout the game and won it easily 21-14.
I ended up with a .500 record for my first day back to the club, which isn’t too bad. I probably should have won the first game but the last two games made up for it. I think changing my racket in the middle really did help, even if it’s just psychologically. I’ll try to play at the club once every week, but I can’t say for sure yet.