Soccer’s done, on to badminton

March means that Spring Sports have finally arrived and one of the most popular sports this season is Badminton.

This year, the team will be led by Coach Megan Flores, who has been teaching Physical Education (PE) at Armijo since 2016. While she has served as the Boys’ Varsity Soccer coach since 2017, it will only be her second year coaching badminton.

“It’s a single and dual sport that is played with a racquet, a birdie, and a net, on a court. Think indoor tennis,” she said.

While she is fairly new to coaching the sport, she does have some experience playing it for fun and teaching it in her PE classes.

Since it is a sport that involves singles players (one on either side of the net from opposing teams) or doubles players (two students from one team playing against two students from another team on the other side of the net), “winning {as a team} is dependent on the majority of the girls winning their matches to win the day’s game,” Coach Flores said. That means there can be some very talented athletes on a team, but if they don’t work hard to bring the whole squad up to the same level, the team will be a disappointment.

It hasn’t been easy for Coach Flores to serve the team well in the preseason as she was taking her soccer players on to a post-season game. “It is also difficult for me as a soccer coach since their preseason and training is during the end of soccer season and I cannot be there for them like I would like,” she said.

Although it might sound like an easy sport to coach, unlike soccer, according to Coach Flores, it does cause stress like any other sport would.  “There is a lot of planning and work that goes on outside of the field/court that makes everything run smoothly and gives our athletes a fun season, memorable season,” she said.

Since it clashes with her soccer schedule, Coach Flores has decided to fully hand over the team to Coach Lesenda next year after she gets used to running things on her own. Hopefully art teacher Ms. Noni Guevara will be able to assist Coach Lesenda next year. They have both played competitively in the high school circuit here in Fairfield.