The sound of shuttlecocks being whacked over nets echoed around the Arena and old Sports Building last weekend, as UL hosted the fourth annual Irish International Student Badminton Tournament. 230 players, from novices to internationals, spent all of Saturday and Sunday trying to serve, smash and sneakily drop shot their way to victory in the Badminton Ireland event.
In total, roughly 300 matches were played altogether, according to tournament administrator, John Donovan. Players competed in four different sections according to their ability across five disciplines – men’s and ladies’ singles, men’s and ladies’ doubles and mixed doubles.
In order to promote socialising across team and country borders, partners for the doubles events are selected randomly. The scoring was calculated using the Swiss Ladder System, which means that all players play the same amount of matches in a league. It also meant that every single rally counted towards the overall rankings. After the first round of matches, the top two players play each other, as do the third and fourth ones, and so on. This format meant that people were always playing against people of similar ability, and it lead to some close-fought matches.
The overall team award for winning the most amount of games by their players across all disciplines went to the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, who emerged out of the 24 colleges represented to take the top prize. The past winners of the event are NUI Galway, UCC and Karlsruhe from Germany.
Some of the top players used last weekend’s event as a warm-up for the European University Championships that are taking place this week in St. Petersburg. Gary O’Sullivan, holder of a badminton sports scholarship at UCC who is representing the Cork team in Russia this week, spoke highly of the standard of play on show at UL this weekend. ‘You couldn’t ask for a better preparation,’ he said.
Both the participants and organisers heaped praise on the quality of the venue. The fact that Badminton Ireland chose to host the event in UL for the fourth year running is a testament to the fantastic facilities on offer there, according to Ivor Guiney, club captain of the UL Badminton Club. He also remarked that there has been speculation that the Malaysian Olympic badminton team are looking into using the Arena as a training venue for the 2012 London Games.
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