by Mark McDermott
Three years ago, the Mira Costa High School badminton program barely had a pulse.
Only 12 students, across both varsity and junior varsity, joined the team in 2021. Badminton appeared to be on the cusp of disappearing from Costa.
It was a precipitous fall for a program that had produced CIF championships. The pandemic was partly to blame, but it was more than that. The sport got no respect.
MCHS senior Zach Berkes said that two years ago, the badminton squad’s only home game got canceled – because the boys basketball team wanted the gym for an offseason practice.
“We used to have to fight with off-season basketball to get a home match,” said Berkes, who is the badminton team captain.
Things have changed. Beginning on Friday, and continuing next Monday and Wednesday, the Mira Costa badminton team will host the first three rounds of the CIF playoffs at the MCHS Pavillion. The MCHS team is quickly becoming one of the powerhouses in the state, and has a chance to capture both a team CIF championship, as well as individual and doubles titles. The team is generating a buzz on the Costa campus. Last year, 45 kids were in the badminton program, so many that the coaching staff decided to take only 36 players this year, after tryouts, in order to give players more individual attention from coaches.
There are a few reasons for the turnaround, including the sparkling new Pavillion gym, robust community and administrative support, and a revered coaching staff that includes husband and wife Dave and Cindy Levin and legendary Mira Costa Coach Patty Perkinson. But perhaps the main reason is the players themselves have emphatically put badminton on the map.
“I think the reason why we’ve been able to grow so much is because we’ve been able to foster this community on campus,” said Berkes. “Where before we had one home match in our whole season, and it ended up getting canceled because of offseason basketball practice, and we fought really hard – to get lines in the gym, to get time in the gym. Last year, we had to come in during zero period to work out in our weight room. Every day, we managed to fit in time, even after school in the preseason, to do some conditioning on the track. We really forced our way onto this campus. And we demanded the respect.”
These days, the badminton kids are a force to be reckoned with on campus. They proudly wear their badminton team jackets, and more kids want to be on the team than there are spots. Last month, KTLA featured the badminton team, along with the MCHC Cheer squad, on its special “school spirit” morning segment.
“It’s really unheard of, in past years,” Berkes said of this kind of attention. “You know, if you’d told me last year that I’d be getting interviewed live on television for Mira Costa badminton, I’d say you are a fool.”
Mira Costa badminton has made its presence known, both by winning, and by doing so with a certain amount of undaunted swagger.
“People have been hearing about it,” Berkes said. “And now it’s a known, respected sport on campus, which has been my dream my whole high school career.”
Badminton is on the rise both globally and nationally. One recent study found a particularly rising popularity for the sport among Gen Z, and Pinterest reports a huge uptick in searches for “badminton racket” and “badminton outfit” on its sites. The sport, which originated in mid-19th Century colonial India and was originally called “Battledore and Shuttlecock” (battledore is another name for the racquet, the sport’s unique, conical projectile is called a shuttlecock) became an Olympic sport in 1992.
“It’s an elite athletic event, and anyone who is familiar with Olympic caliber indoor badminton realizes that,” said MCHS coach Dave Levin. “But the view in the United States, which has harmed badminton’s development for many years, is that it’s a picnic sport you play in your backyard in the summer. The reason badminton continues to grow in the United States is because of the emigration of Asian and Indian players, who made the sport explode in the U.S.”
Manhattan Beach is unusual in the U.S. in that badminton has a long history here, which is another reason underlying the Mira Costa program’s success. The Manhattan Beach Badminton Club was founded in 1936, and for most of its existence was one of very few such elite caliber badminton facilities, and clubs, in the nation. For decades, before Mira Costa built its new Pavillion gym, the MBBC was the high school team’s home, as well.
Alan Berkes, Zach’s father and a key volunteer who does everything for the Costa badminton club from photographing to running its website, said that MBBC is fundamental to MCHS badminton’s rich history and present resurgence.
“The club is really the core of the success of the program,” he said.
Coach Cindy Levin began playing at the club when she was eight years old.
“My parents belonged to the club since the early 1960s, and all four of us kids played,” she said. “Our whole family would play.”
She was part of CIF Southern Section championship teams at MCHS in 1976 and 1978, and then went to Arizona State University, where she won two national badminton championships in 1980 and 1981. It was at ASU that she also met her future husband, Dave, who had coached the ASU men’s and women’s teams to national championships in 1978. He actually moved to Manhattan Beach, later in 1978. He and Cindy were not yet boyfriend and girlfriend. He moved to be near MBBC, because very few such clubs existed at the time and he wanted to continue training as an elite player. When she returned to her hometown after college, their romance bloomed. They’ve played together ever since, and in 2016, after retiring, became MCHS coaches together.
“Badminton is truly our life,” Dave Levin said.
It’s fitting that the couple coach together, because badminton is the only coed sport in the CIF. Boys and girls practice together, and compete together on doubles teams. One of the team’s best players is senior Isabelle Chen, and when she is on the court, she is feared by opposing players, male and female alike. The team’s other best player is a 14-year-old freshman, Hao Lin.
Dave Levin said this speaks to another unique aspect of the sport.
“Badminton is not dictated by someone who’s six foot five inches tall or 200 pounds or bench presses 300 pounds,” he said. “Speed is the most important factor of a high quality badminton player. The current world champion is six foot four, but he competes regularly against people who are five foot seven and five foot eight, and it is not an advantage or disadvantage. Speed is the great equalizer, and that’s why badminton is a unique sport.”
As Zach Berkes told KTLA, what those unfamiliar with badminton fail to realize about the sport is its intensity.“It’s something you might not think of when you think of badminton,” he said.
“I think a common misconception about badminton is that it’s slow, that you hit it lightly over the net,” Berkes said. “In reality, it’s very fast paced. You need to have quick reflexes, especially in the higher level matches. It really gets your adrenaline pumping.”
Levin said that the physics of badminton are what make it such a unique and thrilling sport.
“The shuttlecock leaves the racket at over 200 miles an hour when hit by an Olympic caliber athlete,” he said. “So the unique nature of badminton is that it loses its momentum over a period of time. The design of the shuttlecock, which has not changed since badminton was brought to the Western world in the late 1800s, allows it to decelerate enough to give your opponent the chance to return the shuttle, even though it leaves their racket at these enormous speeds.
A ping pong ball maintains its momentum, a squash ball maintains its momentum, but the deceleration of the shuttle allows you to return even the hardest shots. At the elite level, you have less than one second in between rally shots to return the shuttle.”
Zach Levin said that along with speed and hand-eye coordination, skill in handling the racquet is key. A well hit shuttlecock explodes off the racquet.
“When it hits the sweet part of the racquet, it really is satisfying,” he said. “Like Hao Lin, who is one of my partners, he’s a freshman, but the way the birdie sounds when he hits it – it’s like a sonic boom. It vibrates through the whole gym. It’s incredible.”
Alan Berkes, who works for an organization called Steel Sports that was co-founded by former Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda to promote positive youth sports experiences, cites a study by Aspen Institute’s Project Play which found that 70 percent of kids quit sports by age 13. In part, this is because sports can become overly pressure-packed, and no longer fun for kids. Berkes said that watching even the most high-level matches the Costa badminton team plays, you rarely see a player who isn’t exuberant about playing.
“I’ve never seen kids in the heat of competition smile as much as they do in badminton,” Berkes said. “It’s a very different vibe. When they make a mistake, they support each other. There’s a thing where you click your racquets, and typically smile, like, ‘I’m sorry.’”
At practice, Dave Levin said, “There is some giggling going on.”
These are different kids. Were it not for badminton, they probably would not be engaged in high school sports at all. They tend to be true scholar-athletes. It’s not unusual, Berkes said, to see players studying and doing homework in between matches.
“It’s a great group of kids,” he said. “They’ve got a lot going on at school. If you total the GPA up for the badminton team versus any other team at Costa, probably you would get a higher GPA with the badminton team. The kids are overachievers when it comes to school, but they want to be involved in sport.”
“In a lot of the other sports, you have the typical jock kind of person,” said Zach Berkes. “In badminton, we have band kids, kids who are in orchestra, Model UN and all sorts of different backgrounds and interests, and a lot of academically proficient students who really focus on their academics, while also playing badminton.”
“Our biggest competitor is not other schools,” Dave Levin said. “Sometimes, it’s the AP testing regime, because so many of our players take AP classes. Almost all of them play a musical instrument. It’s amazing to see what they achieved, and I’m proud of them when they go off to school, to Princeton, or UCLA, Berkeley or Stanford. They are very high achieving. It’s a pleasure to watch.”
Make no mistake, though, when the Mustang badminton team gets between the lines of the court, their focus is laser sharp on excelling at their sport.
“It’s a really good community of people we sort of curated with this program,” Zach Berkes said. “And we all have a really great time with each other. But when it gets down to playing, we really do get down to business.”
The business at hand is winning CIF. The team captain feels the hand of fate moving in that direction.
“I think the past four years have been accumulating toward this one moment,” Berkes said. “It’s sort of what the stars have aligned. We have a really strong team this year, and we’ve been able to beat a lot of the teams that are in our division…This is a very winnable tournament. We have three home matches in a row, which helps us, and probably one of the best teams we’ve had in many years. So I think we could really win it all. That’s our aim.” ER
2024-05-02 23:22:47
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