Last month UNIS’ APAC Badminton teams traveled to Beijing, China to compete against the super APAC Badminton teams at the International School of Beijing. Although UNIS did not win many matches, it was still an exciting and thrilling experience for all the players as this year’s teams were the first UNIS teams to experience APAC Badminton.

To set out the basics, each game was played against an identical team from a competing school (singles against singles, doubles against doubles, mixed doubles against mixed doubles). In order to win a game, a team had to win at least 2 sets out of the 3. Each set was out of 15 points.

Here’s the daily schedule of the games:

Day 1 & 2: Round Robin Games – UNIS plays against all the competing schools. If a team wins, it increases their school’s ranking in the tournament.

Day 3: Individual teams from each school compete. If a team wins, it increases their individual ranking (not UNIS’ ranking).

Some of the UNIS player’s standout achievements included:

• Abhimanyu Singh (grade 11): Played for Singles Boys 1 came 13^th place out of 24
• Ragne Henaes (grade 11): Played for Singles Girls 1 came 17^th place out of 24

Although the results may not seem impressive, UNIS didn’t do badly considering that this was UNIS’ first APAC Badminton and the players were attending a Super APAC tournament.

From this experience, the players made numerous memories, such as going to the Great Wall of China on our last day in Beijing. Another special memory was a saying that our beloved Coach Pho constantly reminded us of: “MENTAL!” This saying is very dear to all the players as it reminded us to maintain a stable mentality during our games no matter what the score was.

This memorable event was thoroughly enjoyed by all the players and although this was a small step towards the Championship trophy, I believe that the future UNIS Badminton teams can make it!