On Thursday, Woodland Christian High School earned the honor of being the overall District 8 badminton champions.
Woodland had great performances throughout the tournament with both a first-place finish in the junior team results and a third place finish in the senior team results.
The great junior performances by Woodland include, a gold medal win by Donny Ren in the junior boys singles event and a silver medal victory by Sydney VanderHoef in the junior girls singles event. Also Woodland did very well in the doubles events as well. Wesse Isaacs and Derek Greydanus took home gold for junior boys doubles. The team of Nicole Hellinga and Nicolas Hamming captured another gold for Woodland in mixed doubles with their fellow classmates, the pair of Carina Wolfert and David Boonstra winning silver medals.
Some of the outstanding senior performances for Woodland all came in doubles play. The pair of Spencer Carrick and Brendan VanderGeest winning gold in the boys event, Melena Lagana and Mariah Jolin winning Gold in the girls event and the dynamic duo of Julia DeWeerd and Dan Wolfert who won gold as well in the mixed event.
Monsignor Doyle finished first in the senior results and second in the overall results. Some of their best performances that got them the first place finish in the senior events were a bronze medal win by Karl Olivo in the boys singles, another bronze from Abbey McLeman in the girls singles competition. In the doubles events it was the play of Tiago Sousa and Carter MacKay that brought home silver in the boys event and Stacey Pereira and Kara Durdle that took bronze.
Other great junior performances outside of the two championship teams came from, Kristian Kopic (silver) for Resurrection in junior boys singles. Also a gold medal victory by Erin Wang (Resurrection) in junior girls singles, not to mention James Carr-Pries and Kean Snider (Rockaway) who grabbed a gold in junior boys doubles.
Other great senior play was had by Nick Pehme (Resurrection) and Yaoren Liang (St. Benedict’s) who won gold and silver for boys singles respectively. AJ Bajaro (St. Benedict’s) and Kristine Wu (Rockaway) competed very strongly with Bajaro finishing first, winning gold and Wu finishing second, for silver. Lastly, the two doubles teams that stood out were, Kat Klassen and Jamie Torrance-Perks of Rockaway who captured silver and girls doubles. Makayla Gomes and Colin Bakker of St. Mary’s finished second with silver in mixed doubles.
All first and second place finishers from the District 8 championships will advance to the CWOSSA championships taking place on April 20th (junior) and 21st (senior) at Conestoga College.
Story by: Keenan O’Donoghue