A day of smooth sailing

In the past few years, I have been silently lamenting the fact that I never managed to make it past third place since winning gold in Moto Olympiad in 2017. Not just in the inter-companies badminton tournament (in which we have never broken through third place since I joined), but also in the last two internal badminton tournaments in the company. Last year my team came in fourth place, and this year we managed third place. (We had a decent chance at second place, but in the end it was not meant to be…)

This year they introduced a pickleball tournament as well, and as you may have guessed from the title and the introductory paragraph, I finally managed to break the bronze curse!

Here is where I shall back up a bit and go through the whole process, so be warned, it’s gonna be long. :P (You can scroll directly down to the pictures if you don't want to read!)

I had only played pickleball twice when I decided to form my team. At that time, they had already announced that there would be badminton, pickleball, and volleyball tournaments in the company this year. The badminton tournament came first, and seeing how the good players got snapped up really quickly, I decided that I knew enough decent pickleball players to form a team. For badminton, each team could have up to six male and six female players, to play five pairs of mixed doubles. They hadn’t announced anything for pickleball yet, but I expected there would be room for at least four male and four female players. So I started recruiting, just by asking whether they would join me. I figured that I would just get additional players later if I needed more.

Since I didn’t really know pickleball players, my evaluation of whether a pickleball player was “decent” was based more on their badminton skill, and whatever else I knew about them. My goal was not high; I wanted a team with a fighting chance, but it was fine if we weren't really good enough to win.

I easily managed to ask four guys to join (no rejections, yay!), but two of my badminton teammates did not want to join, and I only managed to get one other female player, a newcomer to the company who was also a good badminton player. No matter, I waited till the tournament was properly announced…and it turned out that they wanted four male and four female players in a team, for three pairs of mixed doubles. (We heard that the “mixed doubles” format was a requirement from our director, which is why there were no men’s/women’s doubles for both badminton and pickleball.) That sort of put me out a bit because I didn’t expect I would not be able to add any more guys to my team. But luckily I didn’t have to let go of anyone!

When I asked my star player (a guy who had been winning pickleball tournaments!) whether he knew any female players to invite, he recommended his wife, and also said that another guy (a good player) was interested to join the tournament too. Unfortunately I didn't have any slot left for the guy, but I gladly recruited his wife. Together with another girl who plays badminton with us (but who is not as good as my badminton teammates), we made up the eight members.

The tournament starts with eight teams split into two groups, where the top two from each team would advance to the semi-finals. During the draw, my friend, who did not want to join when I asked her, came and helped us draw a number (being a lucky person), and that was probably the number one factor of our smooth day.

Our group had two stronger teams (including us), while the other group had three. Although during the draw, we only knew of two good teams in the other group, since we didn’t know most of the players. We didn’t even know if the “unknown” teams would turn out to be really strong.

And guess what? We managed to finish top of our group! (We are Paddle Dash, NOT Pick-Ka-Chiu :P )

Now let’s start counting how we were lucky:

The first stroke of luck is that the first two teams that we were playing against didn’t seem to be very strong (again, we expected there might be surprises, but in the end luckily none came). So we could let our less strong players play, and put all our stronger players into the third match if we needed to catch up on points. But if we played very well (or very badly), to the point that the result of the third match did not matter any more, we would be able to let the less strong players play again.

The second stroke of luck is that we managed to win 6-0 (2 sets per mixed doubles pair) in both of the first two matches. This meant that we had 12 points, while the last team that we were playing against had 7 points after two matches. We only needed one point against that last team to be top of our group. So we put in our top pair to guarantee that one point, and shuffled the other players to let everyone play more.

We still managed a score of 4-2 in that third match, giving us a comfortable lead in the group (not that it mattered :P )

If you are interested in the full order of play, here is a picture of the schedule together with the final score from above: 

After lunch, in the semis we played against the second of the other group. Here came the third stroke of luck: Our star player picked a lucky number (2), and in playing the second match, he was pitted against the top player of the other team, and helped us win two points. We only lost one point to that team; with two teams winning both sets, and one pair getting a draw.

And in the finals, against a team that had two really good players (and everyone said they were impossible to play against), we got our fourth stroke of luck: Our star player beat one of their really good players, the other one beat our not-as-strong pair, and we still managed to beat their other pair, who was still good though not as good as the other two. Probably because their female players were not as strong as ours, and could not support their partner so well!

So here's our gold medal: 

With a similar design to the badminton one. Unfortunately I will have no chance of getting a silver medal because I am not joining the volleyball tournament. :P

The above was all about the team’s results. On a personal note, I sat out the first match, and played in all the subsequent ones. Mostly I partnered our reliable second-best player, with whom I won all the matches (yay!), and in the third match where the result mattered less, I partnered our less-strong player, where we managed a draw (still yay!).

We really did not lose a lot of sets…we dropped only two sets in the group stage, followed by one in the semis, and two in the finals. Overall a very good performance.

Here is where I would like to say that the players I recruited really stepped up and exceeded my expectations. Like I said, I was trying to get decent players who could fight for a win. But I managed to find three great male players: my star player (easily the best player in the whole internal tournament); my second-best player that I had never seen play, but turned out to be better than I dared to expect; and my third-best player who was recruited after I saw his serve being amazingly difficult to receive, even when he was playing for the first time and we were playing for the second time. Besides the top two players, everyone else in the team were almost beginners, but managed to improve quite a bit (in the case of the third-best player, a lot) during the few weeks of practice before the tournament.

Note: I will probably add team photos later. 

And here's our team photo!

Taken at the VIP court (where we played the finals) after the prize-giving.

And this is the only video where I played a winning shot: (gotta keep it somewhere; I don't know whether there will be any more captured on video in future!)