Crash-Course Training in July

3rd Place 2012 School Tournament

One week after Inter-MBA, their school Ladang Harcroft held a closed tournament in MBA. Aaron advanced up to 4^th round where he lost to Lee Jie Quan (Std 4) who was vastly superior in skill and was trashed. Jie Quan eventually became runners-up. Ryan fared slightly better fought his way up to semi-final and was defeated by Ooi Zhin Yang (Std 5) who had vastly advanced skills and was no match for him. Zhin Yang became the school’s Champion. 

We decided to take the boys off the MBA training schedules temporarily and attempted to train them ourselves. We believed that we could give the boys much better one-to-one focus compared with MBA whereby the coaches had to oversee a group of kids with diluted attention.

So we started training the boys at our usual Bt Jalil badminton weekend games. We drilled them with lots of singles stroke play and motivational talks. We practiced net play, shadow for footwork and pointed out where they should place shuttle during sparring. During the night, I supplemented with soft skill drills at home to familiarize them with correct grip, sweet spot and racquet control.

After just one short month, the results were very positive. We could see Aaron benefitted more due to his attentiveness. He started to use cross net drops and overhead drops which caught me by surprise. 

At the end of July, their school called for a selection to form a school badminton team. They needed to prepare for MSSM inter-school games in early 2013.

Our boys played knock-out games and advanced right up to top four. Ryan again met with Ooi Zhin Yang and just couldn’t cope with his sharpness. Again Aaron met Lee Jie Quan, still could not get the better of his more powerful opponent. We have been told that both the No.1 & No.2 ranked boys trained daily at MBA long before our boys got started.

Although Ryan and Aaron lost to the much better players respectively, we could see that they have more variety in their shots now after overcoming the rest of the field. The school coach paid particular attention to Aaron since he had 2 more good years ahead of him to represent his school. There were glimpses of moves Aaron made that had the potential to go far.

The school coach selected the top 10 students for the school team and urged us to continue with the subsidized training under the MBA school plan. We were so upbeat by the results at the school selection that I decided to extend another month of private training stint with the boys.

SJKC Ladang Harcroft Badminton Team