Asda Athletes

I am really pleased to have recently found out that I have been selected to play for England in the Under 15 Langenfeld tournament in Germany, which is being held from the 24th – 26th August. The only downfall to this is that I am supposed to be on holiday with my family and our friends in Turkey. My dad has heroically said that he will bring me back early so that I can join the team.

Although this has cost my family more in air fares, I am lucky that my parents are very supportive and agree that it is a privilege to be chosen to represent my country once again.

Last Friday I visited my local Asda with five of my closest friends who had all agreed to help me with my first attempt at fundraising “Bag Packing”

It was a great experience, everyone was very helpful and all the Asda colleagues were happy and always smiling. Not everyone let us help them pack their bags, but we accepted that politely and moved onto the next one.

This was a great way to get me introduced into the world of fundraising and it really did show me how hard you have to work, it was very tiring even though we were only there for a couple of hours and the store was not at it’s busiest.

I am grateful that my friends wanted to support me and that they gave up their time to help, I hope that they will come back again when we go for a full busy day! Adele – Asda Milton Keynes Community Life Champion is so enthusiastic and helpful and made us feel very welcome. I am really looking forward to this summers events.

Just had a meeting with Adele Johnson – Community Life Champion at my local Asda we are going to be working together over the next few months and have come up with lots of ideas for fundraising events – very exciting. Starting off by doing some bag packing next Friday!! Better get some practice in, this is going to be fun!!

I have just come back from playing for England in the Home Nations Quadrangular which was held in Glasgow. In the team event we played Wales first and won in a 9-0 victory, then we had to play Ireland and won in a tight 5-4 match. The last game was against Scotland this was going to be tough as they are a very strong team and although we all felt that we could have beaten them, it was not to be on this occasion and we lost 6-3. The games were good and some went to 3 sets. Scotland took the team event, this will give us more determination to take the cup from them next year.

The next day saw the start of the individual tournament, at the beginning of the day it was a straight knock-out in the singles. I played reasonably well but felt I could have done better, I did reach the last 16 losing out to a strong Irish player. Next time I will make sure I give him a much harder match. Next up was the Mixed Doubles and this time Badminton England partnered me with Kirby Ngan a fellow England team mate, we also reached the last 16 and lost to a Welsh pair in three close sets. I think this was a good result as we had not played together before, I was happy with the result.

The last games of the tournament was the level doubles. I had been teamed up with my usual partner Max Flynn, we reached the quarter finals, but again lost to a strong Welsh duo in 3 very hard sets.

Overall I was happy with my performance, it was an Under 15 tournament which is a year above my own age group.

I am now looking forward to the next time I am selected to play for our Country!

In March I was chosen to play by my team – Team Forza in the Schleswig Cup in Germany,

My coach thought I would gain more experience by playing in the Under 19 event, 5 years above my own age range. It was tough as my opponents were stronger but I was playing really well and came out on top, winning the Gold Medal!

As none of my team mates were playing in the older age groups, I was partnered with a Germany boy to play doubles in the Under 22 age group, 8 years above my age range. However the partnership did not gel and we unfortunately lost in the group stages.

My coach decided that for the Mixed doubles I should play with my team mate Amber Ngo in the Under 17‘s, we played well together and got as far as the semi finals, losing to a Swiss partnership, which meant we had to play for 3rd place. This meant that we had to play against 2 players from our own team but we came out on top to take 3rd place.