After a tough loss against Wilcox, Paly badminton was unable to bounce back and lost to Monta Vista 17-13 at home. 

The Vikings started strong by winning the first round of games 8-4, but couldn’t hold on to their lead for the remaining matches. 

“I would say we did pretty good, two of our top players were absent so if either of them were there, we would have taken it,” junior captain Andrew Li said. 

This defeat marks the Viking’s fourth loss in a row, causing the team’s morale to dwindle. 

“We have to work harder in practice if we want to see better results,” sophomore Gary Yan said. 

Competitive badminton is scored based on how many individual games each team wins. Each match consists of three singles games for each gender, three doubles games for each gender, and three mixed doubles games. Of the three games per event, they are ranked 1 through 3, 1 being the best. Each varsity 1 game is worth three points while varsity 2 is worth 2 and varsity 3 is worth 1.  

This format places great importance on placing players in the correct slots based on their skill level. However, there are ways teams find loopholes in this system to play to their benefit. This is called sacking. 

“Sacking is when you’re not confident that you can win an event because your opponents have really good players in that event, so you’re going to take all your single players and put them in doubles, and put some worse players in singles because you know you won’t win them anyway,” Li said. 

This strategy isn’t free of controversy for it goes against the system’s intention of causing fair matches. 

“I think sacking is a bad strategy because it accepts your loss and shows that your team is not confident in themselves,” Yan said.  

The Vikings lost their next game against Cupertino, but hope to beat Milpitas today.