anyone else play in Edmonton Corporate Challenge?

I played badminton for my Corporate Challenge team, I had never played before and have always wanted to try it. Most of my team members did not really play much badminton, but they were all athletic so I thought we would do fairly well.

The format is this-2 companies play against each other, 1-Mens Doubles, 1-Women's doubles, and 1-Mixed doubles. each player can only play 1 event per round. each match you play all 3 games regardless of who wins, the games are to 11, old scoring style. They count your games won, and in the event of a tie, they count your scores to determine your placing.

I found this format to be very strange, it made it hard to play. But the atmosphere was a lot of fun, there were people with "thundersticks", people watching from the bleachers, people cheering for their teammates. For me, the best thing about team events is cheering for your teammates, it makes badminton more of a team sport rather than an individual one.

We won our first round fairly quickly, 9 games to 0. The other team was very friendly, I played mixed and we had a lot of fun. The second round I played mens doubles, my partner didnt really play badminton but is a very good athlete. we played against two fairly good players, but both were very unsportsmanlike! the one guy always aimed at his opponents' head when the opponent was standing at the net, and he had an easy smash (at the FRONT service line or 1 step behind it). I saw him hit his opponent in the head at least 4 or 5 times in his previous match. anyway, we won the first game using a good strategy, and after they lost the final point, the guy takes the shuttle and hits it completely out of the court! so I went to pick it up, we played the second game, the same guy kept trying to change the score, he was trying to take away points from us. luckily I knew he was trying this, and I called the score after every rally. we won both the next 2 games.

after this we lost our women's doubles, the other team had a strong women's player and she played very well. so the round came down to mixed. I went to get some food, when I came back, one of their players (not playing) was calling out scores and serves like an umpire! not only that, he was calling the lines for his teammates. The guy playing also had an obviously illegal drive serve, and he kept calling really bad lines. one point, he said he did not see the shuttle (I did not see this, but I was told it was in, so it may have been in or out), so he asked his teammates sitting on the sideline if it was in, they said it was out. when my teammates playing against him questioned this, their team captain walked on to the court and lectured them that it was their call and not to question it!!

I finally saw what was going on, and told them to stop calling the lines, and calling the score. they said "our guys are having problems with the score" but that is really not a good reason, if your having troubles, call an umpire right? it was too late, our team was obviously rattled by these tactics, and we ended up losing.

Now, this team was fairly well balanced, and probably would have beat us anyway, but it was disappointing to lose in this manner, the team obviously knew the rules, and were resorting to this because they saw this would be a close match.

Is this type of gamesmanship common in Corp challenge? I had thought this was a friendly event but this was my first time so I have no other experience with it.

in our next round, we managed to win 6 out of the 8 games, so we were 2-1. we finished second in our pool, not bad, but we did not move on to the next round. overall, pretty good showing though.

other than that experience I had a lot of fun at Corporate Challenge and I think I will try out again next year!