QHSS Boys Badminton: Serving Up Their First Season

The QHSS community welcomes its newest team of athletes—and perhaps its most awaited team among students.

The Boys’ Varsity Badminton team made its season debut on October 9th, 2025. Throughout the month of October, the team demonstrated great adaptability and growth, concluding the season with three wins and one loss.

But the team’s success can’t solely be attributed to the players’ performance. Student coaches Selina Dong and Rita Zhu, along with managers Nami Feng and Anjali Patel, modeled the boys’ team after the successes of the Girls Badminton team, which will return for the spring season in 2026. All girls have played on the Girls’ Badminton team as starters. 

Selina Dong, a junior, recalls there were “about 50-60 students over two days of tryouts” but “people started dropping out” after the first round of tryouts. In the process of finding aspiring players to join the team, juniors Rita Zhu and Nami Feng decided that “it was obvious that some people were more high-level,” with “the most weight on gameplay such as serving.” The skill difference was even more apparent through “hosting mini competitions during the tryouts,” says Feng, who supervised the tryouts along with fellow managers.

Eventually, 18 members were picked to be on QHSS’s first Boys Varsity Badminton team—including captain and Doubles 1 starter Holung Huang.

Both managers and captains agree that there are many things to be improved upon by the team’s performance this season. 

As a current junior, Holung hopes the team “makes it to playoffs, (and) honestly just improves on teamwork and skills as a team” before his senior year. On the courtside, co-coaches Dong and Zhu aim to “have more targeted and skill-based practices…practicing one specific skill like dropping or smashing.” Zhu agreed on having “more input from players on what specific skills they want to work on.”

Additionally, when it came to both performance and access to opportunities, the team pointed to limitations in available space and equipment. The QHSS Boys’ Badminton and Girls’ Volleyball teams frequently have to split the York College gym, at times practicing on only half or even a quarter of the space. Similarly, Dong identified that the team had “too little practice time” and that “using public transportation to (go to) games tired everyone out before the game—it took two hours to get to games in the Bronx, carrying individual equipment.” The team hopes to improve enough as a team to play games within the Queens division to avoid long travel times and stay within the borough for games.

When asked how he feels about the promising future of the team, Huang stated, “I feel very honored to be the first captain. I’m very excited for the years to come and where we will go next.”