ANNA RICE BADMINTON

Wow...what an exciting few months I've had.  Uganda is a very special country and I am so honored to have been able to live there the past few months.  I made some incredible friends and had some serious 'eye-opening' experiences that will be with me for my entire life.

I apologize that I haven't updated my blog as frequently as I had hoped, however, internet access to this site was limited from Uganda.  I arrived back to Canada two weeks ago, just in time to fly to a training camp in the middle of Canada in a city called Winnipeg.  The last time I was in Winnipeg was early December and the temperature was all the way down to minus 43 degrees celcius!!  This time the sun was out and the weather was gorgous.

The training camp was for all Canadian national team athletes, which included about 15 players from across Canada.  Us 'oldies' were there, such as myself, Bobby Milroy, William Milroy, Andrew Dabeka, Stephan (the man) Wojikovich and Milaine Cloutier, and our younger team members were there too, such as Michelle Li, Alex Bruce, Joycelyn Ko, Alex Pang, Derrick Ng, Toby Ng, Dave Snider and Richard Liang.   We had a great week and it was fun to train together as a 'team', since that is something that hasn't been done since a pre-Olympic training camp back in 2004!

Our newly appointed National coaches (Ram Nayyar and Jeff White) were leading the camp, and we had the honor of having several guest coaches and sparring players in attendance to help us with the training.  Former All England Champion and current Indian National Coach Gopichand from India was there and I really enjoyed working with him throughout the week.  The crop of talent he's raised in India (including my friend and recent Super Series winner Saina Nehwal) is truly an impressive accomplishment for Gopi, who is proving he's equally as talented sitting behind the court as he was playing on it.  Sparring partners from England, Denmark, Korea and Indonesia were also there to help with the training and we all had a great time.

I'm currently in Los Angeles competing in the U.S. Open, which is one of my favorite tournaments.   The weather is gorgeous and it's the biggest badminton tournament on our continent, so it always has a special atmosphere.  Former Olympic and World Champ Taufik Hidayat is the top seed on the men's side so it's sure to be a crowd-pleasing tournament.

  The results and live scoring for the U.S. Open can be found on tournamentsoftware.com .  I'd also like to invite you to read my latest blog from the CBC.ca website, in which I talk about a special experience I had during my last weeks in Uganda. Here's the link:

 http://www.cbc.ca/sports/blogs/2009/06/a_day_in_honour_of_the_african.html