The Spruce Ridge School Cougars badminton mixed doubles team overran their competition on Saturday to win the Estevan Comprehensive School (ECS) Junior Badminton Tournament.
The Cougars team of Grade 8 athletes Kelsey Littlejohn and Kaiden Tuchscherer won six of their seven matches at the tourney earning the duo a first-place finish.
“We picked corners and smashed it a lot,” said Tuchscherer.
Eight junior badminton teams from Midale Central School, Lampman School, Weyburn Junior High School, Oxbow Prairie Horizons School, Radville Regional High School, Spruce Ridge and two squads from ECS competed at the junior tournament. Athletes from Weyburn Junior High School won the girl’s singles, boy’s singles and boy’s doubles competitions, while Lampman School took the girl’s doubles title.
Littlejohn said the ECS tournament was the first time the Cougars mixed doubles team played together competitively. She said they did practise once together at Spruce Ridge under the direction of coaches Graeme Summers, Darrell Meyer and Paige Wheeler, but normally compete in different challenges.
Tuchscherer said he’ll be competing in the boy’s singles competition at their next tournament, the sub-districts, which will be played at ECS in a few weeks, and the hope is he can match the results he got in the mixed competition. Littlejohn said the mixed badminton first-place finish marks the end of her season, as she’ll be out of town when the sub-districts take place, but there can be no complaints with how the year played out.
“It was good,” she said. “We got first.”
