Badminton, Anyone?

On winter Friday nights when the men’s hockey team is in town, the west end of Agganis Arena is a raucous coliseum. BU students roar on their team and taunt the opponent with ritualistic finger-wagging whenever the Terriers score, while the BU Band plays Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” and a shaggy alum known as Sasquatch strips off his shirt and waves it furiously.

At the same time, a very different scene unfolds across the way at FitRec, where the BU Badminton Club plays weekly matches. Wielding willowy rackets, students in T-shirts and shorts or sweatpants send shuttlecocks sailing over nets, the thwacks from slams and whispered pings from drop shots making a chorus with the mouse squeaks of sneakered feet on the hardwood. Shuttlecocks litter the floor as if shot from the sky (aptly: they’re also called “birdies”). Polite quiet during play is the unwritten rule; there are no rambunctious cheers from players at their own deft moves, no mocking an opponent’s misfires or missteps. And no half-naked guy bellowing.

“Everyone needs to be quiet during play,” says club president Darian Fard (CAS’17). “Between rallies, they can be going crazy.”

It is this living video of sound and motion that entrances Fard, who took up the game during high school in Toronto. “If someone smashes really hard, the sound is like a cannon,” he says. “It turns heads.” And “when you want to move around, you have to have the proper technique. When you have the proper technique, it’s like you float.” The best players, he says, look “majestic,” “graceful,” and “effortless.”

The different Friday sports in the Agganis wings are not just a tale of different games, but of different cultures. While pro hockey is Americans’ sixth favorite sport (pro football, of course, is solidly number one), badminton for most of us is a backyard diversion for Fourth of July barbecue guests. Three of the six nets the club strings across the courts on Friday are for such laid-back recreational players. The rest belong to those who share Fard’s dream of lobbing BU to the ranks of badminton powerhouses.

Fard showed up at the club’s games during freshman year expecting a huge turnout of players as competitive as he. Instead, “I saw everyone was just like very recreational and very relaxed. I wanted to really bring BU to the competitive level. My hope is that in a few years, we’ll be traveling—not just in Boston—but we’ll go around the country, and we’ll compete. And really build a reputation here for BU…to join some really big badminton associations and really compete at the intercollegiate level.” He’s working on starting a class and finding a coach to teach the sport.

Currently, the club competes in tournaments once or twice a year with schools like Harvard, MIT, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, but its main action is intramural play Fridays (7 to 10 p.m.) and Sundays (11 a.m. to 2 p.m.) in FitRec’s lower courts 2 and 3.

Fard recommends watching foreign tournaments on YouTube to sample the pile-driving hits and lightning rallies of serious shuttlecocking. (The fastest recorded smash in the sport clocked in at 206 miles per hour, which makes badminton the world’s fastest racket sport.) The game was invented by British soldiers in India in the 19th century and is dominated nowadays by players from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and interestingly, Denmark. Fard estimates that 70 percent of the Friday night regulars are international students.

Club member Chenhao Zhou (CAS’18) has played since middle school in his native China. “I find it’s very competitive, and it’s interesting—how to control a birdie, to let it drop where you want it to drop.” Why do so few Americans find it interesting and competitive? Kevin Kwan (SMG’15), a badmintoner since high school in Palo Alto, Calif., suggests that Americans equate athleticism with muscle and strength, whereas badminton-crazy countries favor games of agility and finesse.

“Badminton appeals to me because you don’t have to necessarily be incredibly strong,” says Kwan. “You can rely on tools that don’t require as much strength to win points. You don’t need to be like a LeBron James.”

Unlike tennis, with its many baseline-to-baseline shots and attempts to make the opponent run his tail off, in badminton players try to outmaneuver their opponent, he says. “In tennis, you have to run. Badminton is much more agility-based, where you can get to every point in the court within a matter of a couple of shuffles.” And unlike in his younger, tennis-playing days, Kwan has yet to come down with tennis elbow while on a badminton court.

For those mere duffers with a backyard net, the club is willing to give lessons, Fard says. “If they are a weekend warrior, we will turn them into a BU warrior.”

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