St. Mary’s has a good raquet going in badminton

The sport of badminton looks to be as popular as ever at St. Mary’s School, which has included numerous medal hauls of its athletes at recent tournaments.

Getting an early jump on a already-short badminton season, school athletes made their way to Irvine for a tournament March 14-15 for Grades 6 to 9. The following March 21 weekend, St. Mary’s hosted a Grade 6 tournament.

This weekend, St. Mary’s students are up in Notre Dame for a tournament and then host a Grades 8 and 9 tournament April 11-12.

“Your season is basically winding down after that because you have your counties and then if they place they can go onto zones which is on the 3rd (May). It is a pretty fast season, but we already had lots of medals in our two tournaments,” said Randy Spenrath, a co-organizer of the St. Mary’s School badminton program at the school. “For our Grade 6s, we took home six of the 10 medals (at Irvine) and we did even better at home. For our Grade 8s and 9s in our first tournament, both boys and girls Grade 8 singles and Grade 9 boys singles, all gold and a silver in Grade 9 girls. In the Grade 9 boys doubles we took three teams to the tournament and they placed 1-2-3.”

Coached by Derry Kolody and Rylan Spenrath, students have continued to flock to the badminton program at St. Mary’s.

“From Grade 6 to 12 and we have only six kids in high school who are interested, but our numbers Grade 6 to 9 are close to 50,” said Spenrath. “Our biggest group is Grade 8 to 9 so the future looks good moving forward. We probably have too many students at our practices when you have that many students, but so many students love the game. The hard part is going to be choosing which team to take to districts because you can only take one and everyone is so competitive.”