California Schools Capture Badminton Titles
SWARTHMORE, Pa. -- The University of California-Irvine men's and University of California-Berkeley women's badminton teams captured the 2008 USA Badminton National Championship hosted at Swarthmore College on March 21-23.
Over 200 participants from 15 schools around the country descended upon Delaware (PA) County, just outside Philadelphia, taking part in over 200 matches with more than 15,000 points. The UC-Irvine men repeated in the team championship.
Five individual crowns were awarded: men’s and singles, men’s and women’s doubles and mixed doubles.
UC-Irvine had both finalists in the men’s singles as Nicholas Jinadasa defeated teammate Andrew Todt in a close match, 21-19 and 27-25. Jinadasa also won the mixed doubles’ title, pairing with teammate Alice Wen to win 21-13, 21-19 over Fred Hernandez and Hanae Fujinami from UC-Berkeley.
UC-Berkeley’s Daphne Ng won the women’s singles crown, defeating Tiffanie Kimura from the University of Illinois 21-4, 21-12 and then combined teammate Teresa Lin to win the women’s doubles title over Swarthmore’s Kim Kramer and Maithili Parikh by scores of 21-12 and 21-11.
Steven Jonatan and Tuan La from UC-Berkeley won the men’s doubles title by topped Jongwoo Dong and Emmanuel Pun from UC-San Diego with game scores of 21-17 and 21-14.
Women’s Championship Men’s Championship
UC-Berkeley (champion) 54 UC-Irvine (champion) 53
UC-Irvine 34 UC-Berkeley 30
Univ. Illinois 28 UC-San Diego 27
UC-San Diego 24.5 Cornell 13.25
Swarthmore 19.5 Drexel 11.25
Bryn Mawr 9.5 Univ. Illinois 9.5
Univ. of Maryland 9 Univ. of Maryland 5.5
Princeton 9 Stanford 4.5
Cornell 8.25 Univ. of Wisconsin 4
Drexel 3.25 Univ. of Virginia 3
Stanford 2.5 Univ. of Pennsylvania 2.5
Univ. of Pennsylvania 2 Albright 0
Albright 0 Swarthmore 0
Univ. of Virginia 0 College of Dupage 0
University of Wisconsin 0 Princeton 0
College of Dupage 0