After losing to Mountain View High School 16-14, the Palo Alto High School badminton team cruised to a 18-12 victory over the Spartans on April 21 at Paly.

Paly’s victory was led by the duo of Gavin Chan (’13) and Michael Wang (’13) in number one doubles, who defeated Eric Liu and Darius Goh in straight sets 15-7, 15-6. Both were confident before the match, despite normally playing in singles matches.

“We’re pretty confident because we played them last time and only lost [by two as a team],” Wang said. “We’re hoping to win this time and redeem ourselves after last time.”

Chan and Wang started off slow, allowing Liu and Goh to rally with them, until the second game. The two got out to a quick 11-0 start, immediately fixing their mistakes and limiting the excruciating rallies that slowed them in the first game.

After the match, Chan explained their sudden dominance in the second game.

“It was fun,” Chan said. “They liked to net drop, and once we saw that, it got a lot easier. Thats why we went out 11-o pretty early,  because we picked it up early in our second game.”

Other notable winners included both number one and number two boys’ singles players, Oliver Wang (’13) (number one singles, 15-2,15-1) and Kevin Zhang (’13) (number two singles, 15-2, 15-3) , and Kevin Kwan (’11) and Tiffany Tsung (’12) in number one mixed doubles (15-2, 15-5).

Paly next plays Homestead at Homestead at 2:00 pm on May 5.