I've been looking into joining the Mandarin badminton club, (my friend's parents own the whole things anyway, so why not?) for a while now. Should I? What does it have to offer that puts it over it's competitors?
In terms of competition, Mandarin isn't really competiting with top clubs like B&R, Granite, and Bouelvard, because those are clubs for more than badminton, very fancy, and thus extremely expensive. In general, Mandarin's only competition is really just Lee's. Since Mandarin was formed by a bunch of people from Lee's, most of the prices are around the same, and almost everything at the club is meant to rival Lee's. Basically, Mandarin people just looked at the old Lee's centre and tried to make everything in their club a little bit better (ex. Lee's had this one comfy chair, Mandarin bought many of them for their lounge). So for a while, I would say Mandarin had nice facilities. Now, however, Lee's opened a whole new three courts which are really nice. So now, I would say that Lee's facilities are just as nice if not nicer than Mandarin's. That's that for facilities. In terms of training, however, there really is no competition: Lee's is undoubtedly the better club in terms of training (in all of Ontario, probably). The coaches at Lee's have consistently turned out the top athletes (all the top athletes some Mandarin people boast about having were trained at Lee's), as well as themselves winning titles. Lee's coaches are top athletes from Asia, and indeed some of them were top in the world. The coaches are Jennifer (owner), Efendi (top in his area in Indonesia), Troy (top in his area in Indonesia, and has won a bunch of titles in Canada), Huan Nan Yang (Olympic Silver Medalist, #2 in world @ one point? sth like that), Cherry (Hong Kong team), and some others. THerefore, I would say Mandarin's one-and-only competitor, Lee's, is better than it.
It's about how hard you push YOURSELF. A slacker at Lee's will suck just as much as a slacker at Mandarin. However, I do agree that the Lee's training regime is tougher, which is kind of better I guess.... But Mandarin realizes that, and I guess will make the training much more hellish next year.
Yes, Lees training was quite hellish for me, but it is important to be training intensly like that. Ugg, I'll have to get used to it