By Michael Wojtychiw

Payton has got quite the grasp on the Chicago Public League badminton. Since the sport started as a sponsored CPL sport in 2018, the Grizzlies have won every team championship, other than the one canceled due to the pandemic.

The trend continued this past weekend when the city’s badminton teams met for the city championships at Whitney Young. However, unlike previous seasons, the Grizzlies had to sweat it out until the end.

Coming into the championship matches of both the singles and doubles brackets, both Payton and Young were tied with eight team points. The tournament format was adjusted slightly this year, with each school having only one entry per bracket, so if the two teams split, they would still be tied and the champion would be delivered by a tiebreaker. 

Both Payton entires, second-seeded Hailan Yu and fourth-seeded Ashley Strauss and Shefali Gupta, were underdogs if you went by the tournament seeds but both teams had something that their opponents did not.

Championship experience.

“It’s different every year,” Payton coach Curtis Nunnery said. “Different kids, different competition. It was fun this year because Hailan and (Young’s) Catherine Xu played each other in the title match their sophomore years and that went three sets too. I was a little nervous because Catherine had beaten Hailan twice in the regular season, but she showed up today.”

Yu was the two-time defending singles champion, while Strauss won the doubles title with her now-graduated partner last season.

That experience paid off as both pulled off victories, propelling their program to a sixth consecutive city championship, finishing with 10 team points, two ahead of the host Dolphins. Roosevelt/Von Steuben took third place, while Kenwood finished fourth.

“I was worried it was going to take a while to find a new partner but Shefali and I practiced together early and it really worked, we communicated so easily,” Strauss said.

“She’s been a great teammate because if I had any questions or needed help, she was always there because she knew what was going on,” Gupta said.

The win for Yu closed out her high school career as a three-time champion, the first in CPL badminton history.

She did it her own way.

“I feel like consistency has been key for me all year,” Yu said. “My goal was never to play an entire opponent or anything in the final, but to just win the entire tournament.

“This is really a nice way to cap not only the regular season, but my senior year.”

Even though they were seeded fourth, Strauss/Gupta cruised through the tournament, not dropping a single game in their four victories over teams from Mather, Hubbard, Kenwood and Young. 

In fact, the pair never gave up more than 18 points in a game. 

“Being seeded was some extra motivation,” Strauss said. “We knew we had to keep pushing through and having played these schools before helped us understand what strategies we needed to use.”

Following the city tournament, the teams had about a week to prepare for the state sectional playoffs. Yu was hoping to make it back to state for the second consecutive season. 

“Just have to keep doing what’s been working and stay consistent,” Yu said. “There will be new opponents but we can’t let that fluster us. Just take it one match at a time.”

“Just have to work on the things that we saw we can improve on,” Nunnery said. “We gave up a lot of points, but if we can straighten that out, we should be good.”

The senior did just that, taking third place at the Prospect Sectional. She’ll take part in the state finals this weekend, starting this Friday in DeKalb. Pairings will come out later this week.

Photos by Margo Grogan/Sports Depiction