SAISA is the regional athletic conference that includes many international schools from across the South Asian region. Each tournament is hosted at one of the SAISA schools and the other teams travel to the host school to participate. Over the years, I have been involved in a variety of the SAISA tournaments hosted by The Overseas School of Colombo as a member of the event crew. Usually, I maintain the SAISA website and also work on some of the media aspects of the tournaments like the livestreams, photography and videography. However, I’ve never participated in a SAISA tournament as an athlete. Therefore, one of the CAS goals I set for myself at the start of this year was to participate in a SAISA tournament as an athlete because I felt that it was a key experience I was missing out on. I had played tennis for 4-5 years, so I decided to try out for the SAISA badminton team in hopes that I could transfer some of my tennis skills from one racquet sport to another. I attended the regular practice sessions, and improved quite a bit by the time team selections began.

This year the SAISA Badminton tournament was to be hosted at The American International School in Chennai, India and The Overseas School of Colombo was to take both a varsity and a junior varsity team to the tournament. A round robin tournament between the badminton players at OSC was held in order to select both the varsity and junior varsity teams. I missed quite a few of my games in this tournament because of clashes with my involvement with the Colombo Model United Nations group as well as a Physics field trip to a hydro power plant in central Sri Lanka. Nevertheless, I managed to pull through enough wins in this round robin tournament to get selected to travel with the Junior Varsity tournament. We practiced hard before we travelled and I was chosen to be the fourth seed in boys singles and was paired with Takuro and Sanjana for boys doubles and mixed doubles respectively.

When we arrived in Chennai, we found out that there would be two tournaments hosted simultaneously: one for the varsity teams and one for the junior varsity teams. This was great news because as a junior varsity team, we were strong, but we knew we couldn’t compete with the stronger varsity teams and come out on top. However, we were confident that we could show a good performance in this tournament with only JV teams. The tournament took a round robin format with each team facing every other team, and then moving onto a playoffs stage that included the semi-finals and finals. Our first matchup was with the Lincoln School from Kathmandu, Nepal. I performed well in my singles, and doubles matches against Lincoln, and we cruised by with a win against Lincoln School. The next game for the day was with the home team American International School in Chennai. AISC was much stronger than LS, which took me by surprise. I ended up conceding my singles match quite badly, but then I bounced back and we managed to win the boys and mixed doubles games. Unfortunately, this was still not enough because our team still lost to AISC by a few points. Having lost just one out of 6 games, I was pretty happy with my performance on the first day because it was a first participating in any sort of Badminton tournament for me.

On the next day, we were matched up against my alma mater The American International School in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Many of the players on the AISD team were my friends from middle school and I was not alien to their skills with a badminton racquet. We tried our best, but were definitely no match to the badminton prowess of the Dhaka tigers. Based on our performance in the tournament thus far, we were set to meet AISC in the semi-finals. This time, I knew that every point would count so I tried my best from my first singles match. This time I cleared every single shot to my opponents backhand – a weakness I had identified in the latter stages of my previous match against him. It worked and I came out on top, but unfortunately the other boys failed to win their singles matches. I repeated my good performances in the boys and mixed doubles matches as well and came out with 3/3 wins in this crucial semi final. At the end of all of the games in this matchup, we were all tied up 8-8 to OSC JV and AISC JV. This meant that the winner would be the team that won the most points in all 16 games; I was right every point would count. After an agonizing half hour of waiting for the officials to do the summation, we found out that unfortunately, we wouldn’t be moving on to the finals. We had scored 279 points and AISC had scored 283 points – yes, it all came down to just 4 points! We then played a 3rd place playoff against Lincoln School and easily pulled through with a 16-0 win to seal 3rd place and AISD came out on top in the finals against AISC.

Meanwhile, in the varsity tournament, OSC was putting on a good show and was set to battle it out in a thrilling final against Dhaka’s varsity team. In a nail-biting final, OSC came out on top and emerged champions for the second consecutive year. Personally, I was pretty happy with my performance in the JV tournament. It was disheartening that we missed out on second place by just 4 points, but I had done my best and come out with 11 wins out of 15 games. Overall, SAISA Badminton 2019 was a great experience where I developed my Badminton skills and had a lot of fun. It was also really great meeting my friends from AISD after a few years and catching up with them. Nevertheless, whilst participating as an athlete was a pretty good experience it’s nowhere near as fulfilling for me as when I do my usual work in the tech crew of such events like managing websites, building scoring systems, making videos, taking photos and doing a bunch of other nerdy things because these things are the things I’m truly passionate about.