Bintang is a dedicated badminton gym in the SF Bay Area, they recent got a new gym and it will open on Friday. the new gym has 11 courts with higher ceiling and wooden floor. check out their website at www.bintangbadminton.com here is a flyer for the grand opening event:
I'll be there tonight and tomorrow. Be on the look out for a guy wearing dark colored or blue shorts with a white shirt. Might have wording on the shirt...say hi if you happen to be there.
heehee... or how about - I'm the chinese fella wearing the glasses. heehee... maybe that will describe the other half of the gym?
well that could be a good or bad thing good: you get to meet some people bad: you make a complete fool of yourself. take your pick. see everyone there tonight.
way too many ppl the crowd was crazy and the system was all messed up, hv to literally fight with everyone to play a game. they need to figure a system so that everyone can follow.
at least they had people there to help set up and moniter the games. be happy for that. if they wern't there, all hell would have broken loose but tonight was great, played a few games, won all i think. its nearly impossible to go back to the old system. perhaps if they put some money into a computerized system, it would work. lots of $$$ tho, but it could work. (just a suggestion)
i think the system wasn't so bad, it was just ppls lack of communication and laziness to go up to the boards to look at whos up. People would just somewhat jump on the courts and start hitting and what not. Then they would erase othesr names w/o reason. I don't know... it wans't too bad.. i think the bad system was just a result of too many people. I played like how many games tonight? I think about 7.. though most of them came at the end. The new gym is much nicer than i thought it would be though.
I'm not sure, but I think I saw you there, kwun. Were you the one that played with the girl and were you wearing glasses? Didn't really play that much today, even though my group left around 12:30AM. Tomorrow morning I'm off to Moreau for badminton. Watching that Champions Court really makes me want to get that much better.
yeah. it was really crowded. 11 courts, and at one point, each court has a wait of 2-3 games. that's a lot of ppl! but it was kind of expected though, grand opening first day, $1 drop-in, friday night before a tournament. the system can be improved, but i doubt it will be so crowded in the future so it may still work. i do like the Pleasanton "clip" system better though. honestly, i don't believe how many badminton players there are in the Bay area. but big kudos to Phu and gang. it is a great gym. the ceiling is still low, but higher than i expected. the wall and floor colors are good. sitting area is nice, everything is well planned and executed. flymordecai. i do wear glasses, tall, thin, nerdy looking Chinese guy who needs a haircut badly. Janet is tall and thin as well. i played horribly tonight, Janet played pretty bad too. i think i will need sometime to get use to the new Bintang's atmosphere. we played till around 12.30am. it was rather fun. got there at 7.30pm and i think we played around 8 games. oh well. it was fun. i took some pictures. will post them up soon.
this shows the gym. there are 5 courts on the left hand side, and then 6 courts on the right hand side. the ceiling height is decent. some structural struts are on the way but overall it is pretty ok.
this is what you see from the entrance. notice the sitting area at the end. there are also sitting area at the right hand side.
this is the owner of the gym, Phu. he is a happy guy! he lost his voice coz he was shouting out all the announcements today.
the floor does look very ghetto and uneven, (think its made of plywood and infills) but once u start playing on it, its not too bad at all (except when it gets wet, almost fell down on my own sweat). ceiling is too low to serve high tho...it was pretty cold the whole nite even tho it was so crowded...i wonder if its gonna heat up pretty bad during the summer time since the ventilation is not too great. i think they should just put up a sign up clip board on each court, the kids working for bintang were having a hard time keepin track of the players....two groups before me were verbally fighting and cursing on each other. at one point i thot they're gonna smack each other. but overall it wasnt too bad....not too sure if i'll go back and play there again....for $5 a nite, thats pretty expensive.
Looks similar to ClearOne setup although Darryl uses tournament mats on concrete (with an additional layer of carpet/foam). The lights are pretty exposed whereas at ClearOne, they put some shade to block the glare. How much is the membership? The site says $5/session and the times are listed as Weekdays: 11 to 3 (one session); 5pm to 10 pm (another session) and weekends: 2pm to 10 pm (one session) so that's not too bad. Can you come and go during the session? For example, playing on the weekend; can I leave for a couple of hours for dinner and come back to play until 10 pm?
In their other gym, there would have been no problem doing that since it was pretty small and they know who you are. This gym is pretty big compared to their other one, so I'm not sure if that's possible. Maybe they give you something to give back to them when you return.
