Players impress at badminton tournament
Five players come home with handful of medals from Yellowknife
Stewart Burnett
Northern News Services
Thursday, December 22, 2016
INUVIK
Badminton players from East Three Secondary School showed well and came home with a handful of medals from the Yellowknife high school badminton tournament earlier this month.
Cheyenne Gully, left, and Calvin McDonald compete in the doubles category of the Yellowknife high school badminton tournament in Yellowknife on Dec. 12. - James McCarthy/NNSL photos
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"I couldn't have asked for anything better," said coach Kenzie MacDonald. "Just seeing the level of competition, I was very happy with how it went."
Jarvis Mitchell, Cheyenne Gully, Calvin McDonald, Anibe Abba and Kristen Harder made up the five-person team East Three sent.
Gully won the U19 women's division, while McDonald won the men's B-division and Mitchell won the B-side for U15 boys. Gully and McDonald then teamed up and won mixed doubles.
"(The competition was) really good," said McDonald about his experience at the tournament.
He went 4-1 on the weekend.
The first doubles match with Gully was his highlight. It was a nail-biter that the Inuvik pair won 31-29.
"That was a good one," he said.
McDonald has been playing badminton for three years now.
"I just like covering all the court and the way I smash it," he smiled.
MacDonald said although the other two players from East Three didn't win their divisions, they did better than they anticipated and he was impressed.
The highest level of competition was among the U15 boys, said MacDonald.
"There were probably 35 of them entered into the tournament and it was all very close," he said.
"There was no one dominant athlete that was going to run away with the whole thing from the beginning. It was very close all the way through."
