Jim Xu (pronounced “shoo”) is stocky, standing 5-foot-seven-inches tall and about 180 pounds. Not the build you might expect out of a badminton champion if you weren’t familiar with the competitive version of the sport.
This isn’t your grandmother’s badminton in elementary school, you might say.
“At the high school level, a smash can be clocked up to 100 miles per hour,” says Xu, who as one of four co-captains for University City High coach Jordana Barrios Tu’s team, helped lead the Centurions to the CIF team championship last month. The other co-captains, all graduating seniors as well, are Candace Poon, Arriane Gatlabayan, and Thomas Hua.
Xu, unfailingly polite to an interviewer who comes to his residence as his father, John, sits quietly nearby, gives a mini-clinic on what he says are the “building blocks” to badminton: footwork and hitting form.
If someone were to pass badminton off as an easy sport, Xu, who plans to matriculate at UC Riverside in the fall to study computer science and continue playing badminton competitively, says he would respond, “Badminton is a pretty fast sport. You don’t have time to react. It’s really fast.”
In addition, “There are long rallies that require endurance.” Xu has a physique that looks like he can last. He has proven that in CIF and league play. A year ago with partner Kenny Liu, who graduated, he grasped the CIF men’s double title. This year, new partner Thomas Hua and Xu took home second place.
With Xu and his teammates, the UC team under Barrios Tu has gone to the CIF finals four years in a row, taking a first or second place each of Xu’s years in high school. That’s an impressive record in any sport.
Xu came to America from Guangzhou (formerly Canton), in southern China, with his father John and mother Amy when he was 9 or 10 “so that they could keep me a better environment for studying.” Also, Xu would plead this case for the challenge of his sport, “It requires you to constantly think. When you are making one shot, you have to be thinking of your next shot.”
In his private demonstration of technique, he positions his solid-built body at an angle with his left foot back. “You plant your left foot (if you’re a right-hander like Xu), and lunge with your dominant (right) foot,” he shows. He pivots on his base foot, his left foot. “Side-to-side, it’s going to be similar—left foot back, step with your right.”
“If you don’t learn the basic footwork, as well as the hitting form, you won’t improve as much as others,” he says, sounding not like the lone child he is, but rather an older-brother type of team captain who is used to helping others with their technique.
A key of hitting the birdie, he says, is striking the aerial at about the peak of its flight. “When you hit the birdie solid, you can tell the moment you hit it,” he says. “It makes a certain sound. If you don’t hit it squarely, it makes a sound kind of like hitting metal, because you probably hit it on the racquet frame” (which is made out of a composite graphite material for strength while being lightweight).
Not immodestly, he reveals that he has his two playing racquets, which go for a couple of hundred dollars each, strung tighter than the average player. “The tighter the stringing, the smaller the sweet spot” in the center of the racquet, he says. It affords him more power and pop.
One thinks of Muhammad Ali’s self-description, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” Xu wants to sting the birdie as he returns it over the net, while remaining mobile on his feet.
One of his practical jokes is, in announcing the UC team’s lineup before a match, much in the way high school tennis teams have a captain announce the lineup, declaring, “In women’s singles, Candace Poo,” pronouncing his teammate’s last name incorrectly on purpose. “She doesn’t expect it. I do it a lot. It’s really funny.” And she doesn’t seem to get irritated.Badminton is a social game, and the Centurion team, according to Xu, is a “really close” group of individuals that “goes out to eat after many away matches.” “It depends on where we play, but almost everyone on the team loves Korean barbecue. We go to Convoy Street.”
He first saw his mother Amy play badminton when he was a small child. Then, when he was in the eighth grade, they went to Doyle Recreation Center in University City where he began playing himself.
He explains why the family wanted to position him in the educational program here. “In China, it is too stressful, way too competitive.” What he means is the number of places in universities is dwarfed by the population of students in the huge country.
“When I jump smash (the birdie), it’s a feeling like I get from nothing else,” he enthuses.
How does he achieve his high level of effectiveness of hitting? “You look for exactly where the birdie is, then you jump and release all the energy you have to smash the birdie.”
It sounds very satisfying: kinesthetic (a physical sensation), visual (looking for the location of the birdie), aural (hearing the contact on the sweet spot of the racquet).