A white blur flies back and forth across the net. With a flick of the wrist, Paly senior Mariya Pitel manages to hit past the player in the front, but the opponent’s partner manages to hit it back. With the thoughts of scoring the last point, Mariya’s partner, Alex Kreitz, also a Paly senior backs up and smashes it. Zipping past both opponents’ faces, the shuttlecock lands barely in the opponents’ court, winning the game.
Kreitz and Pitel are just two of the many athletes playing badminton at Paly, but they are also two of the few players with SCVAL experience who are on the varsity badminton team this year.
Last year, Kreitz and his partner, George Wang, placed fifth in boys’ doubles, after losing to Gunn. Pitel and her partner, Aaron Wong, placed in mixed doubles after losing to Cupertino. Both of Pitel and Kreitz lost their partners due to graduation, causing Kreitz and Pitel to be partnered up for the first time as varsity mixed doubles. Kreitz has never had the same partner twice, but Pitel had been Wong’s partner for two years.
"Changing partners doesn’t affect that much," Pitel said. "It might in the beginning though."
Beginning in freshman year, both Kreitz and Pitel have played badminton for Paly. Pitel’s interest in badminton first sparked long before high school. Realizing the fun she had when playing with family and friends, she decided to try badminton in school after debating between badminton, volleyball and soccer.
"For some strange reason [badminton] appeals to me," Pitel said.
On the other hand, Kreitz tried badminton because he held no interest in other sports and thought that it would be easy to get a prep for as well. It wasn’t long though before he discovered that badminton was more fun than at first glance.
"It was so different than anything else." Kreitz said. "I sort of saw it as a challenge. I challenge anybody in school who thinks that badminton is not a sport to come out to a badminton practice and play a game with us and still tell us it’s not a sport."
Although their reasons to join may differ, both started out the same. They always played doubles or mixed.
"Playing with someone is more fun than alone," Pitel said. "However, I would like to train more as a singles player, since that makes playing any type of doubles much easier."
"I just don’t like having to cover the entire court by yourself," Kreitz said. "It may seem like the court is really small, but when you have to run all over it, it seems way bigger. Plus, it’s [doubles] a faster game than singles is."
After losing in SCVALS last year, Kreitz and Pitel aim to reach past SCVALS and make it to CCS this season. Pitel is confident that they will win against Cupertino.
"When we played them last time, Aaron and I had just played a really long game and so we were really tired," Pitel said.
In the past each have trained outside of regular team practice. This year, however, they won’t be training outside of school because there are local volunteers, Mike and Ben, who come to help train the team.
"They [the volunteers] are going to help us out a lot," Kreitz said.
"I doubt we would be able to find anyone better to help us." Pitel said.
With the full season ahead, Pitel and Kreitz look forward to future matches to win.
"It would nice to beat Saratoga or Lynbrook," Pitel said.