BADMINTON
A brilliant return to badminton with a winning season for Sevenoaks students
It was great to get back to fixtures again this year and to discover quite a few new players who either transferred from other sports or who had not been able to play last year due to year-group restrictions . The senior team was made up of players from Year 11 to the Upper Sixth and the enthusiasm for playing was extraordinary . Although we did not get to play as many fixtures as we had hoped due to Covid-19 hitting a couple of our opponents , everyone had great fun competing and overall we had a winning season .
We started the year with a great victory against local rivals , Tonbridge . Despite having a slightly weakened team , some great individual performances and a real desire to win saw us through . Nicholas Leung and Matthew Lam won all their matches to give us a good start , but Tonbridge fought back , and the fixture went down to the wire . The score was 4-4 in matches and 1-1 in the final match , but Luca Jacobelli and Kieran Kiggell were 16-20 down in the final game . However , with all the players cheering them on , they held their nerve and came back to win 26-24 .
Sadly , that was the last time that Matthew was able to play for the team due to injury , but Alston Xu , who had been unable to play in the first fixture due to illness , led the way for the rest of the season with some magnificent performances in both doubles and singles matches . We say goodbye to the Upper Sixth squad players : Nicholas Leung , Luca Jacobelli , Kieran Kiggell , Proud Puangmaha , Kennedy Chee , Aarav Gupta , Kevin Shi and Ryan Koh , and hope they go on to enjoy a great deal of success playing badminton in the future .
Steve Owen
76 SPORT REVIEW