Tournament Turns Into a Waiting Game

The finals of the Southern Section mixed doubles playoffs were postponed until Saturday, after a three-hour delay caused one side of the bracket to start late Thursday at the Orange County Badminton Club.

The bracket, featuring the fourth-seeded team of Nanci Tran and Dung Huynh of Alhambra, was supposed to begin play at 3 p.m. but the Southern Section held up the competition until Angie Yoon of Hacienda Heights Wilson arrived from her calculus Advanced Placement test. Yoon and her partner Benny Yu finally began their first match at 6 p.m., causing some of the teams to wait more than three hours. Yoon and Wu lost in the second round to Mira Costa’s Gavin Erie and Kristen Davis.

Tran skipped the same test, saying she was told the Southern Section said they must arrive on time. She and Huynh played their first match at 4 p.m. Their quarterfinal match against Erie and Davis didn’t begin until almost 8 p.m. Tran and Huynh won, 15-7, 11-15, 15-6. Twenty minutes later, Tran and Huynh went up against Villa Park’s top-seeded team of May Mangkalakiri and Mike Chansawangpuvana in the semifinals and lost, 15-4, 15-4.

“The wait killed me,” said Tran, a senior. “When we were waiting it was kind of dead and it slowed me down. And then when we played Mira Costa it was a long match and it wore us out.”

Chansawangpuvana was unhappy with the delay, because he will now be forced to play the mixed doubles final against defending champion Hoang Bui and his new partner Erin Ly of Long Beach Wilson, Saturday at 1 p.m., before he has to play as many as four singles’ matches.