Postponed Med School for Badminton

GWANGJU – It was 17 years ago, when the young Maxime Tetreault first began to discover how to play Badminton by hitting the Badminton shuttlecock with his dad who introduced him to this game in their backyard. “I just love the sport. I never told myself I wanted to be a Badminton Player, I will just play till I can no longer play. I never had a goal to reach in playing Badminton, except for competing at the Universiade, and I did all what I could to be here at the moment.” That’s how Maxime described his feeling towards Badminton.

Maxime who`s studying Medicine for 5 years at Université de Montréal, said: “Last year, I took a year off from Med School just to train and raise my chances to qualify for this event.” Explaining the reason why he had to take a year off from school, he answered: “School was getting really hard, and it was taking most of my time studying and preparing for finals and so on. I had to reduce my playing hours and I didn`t like this because I wasn`t playing enough as much as I wanted to progress.”

“It didn`t feel so awkward back then. Everyone supported me, especially my parents and also my friends. They all were on my side, Med School is not going away, I know it will be harder when I am back obviously, but as for the Universiade, well, it`s a once in a life-time opportunity, and in no way I wanted to miss such a chance. It`s totally worth it.”

Commenting on how he dealt with being a Medicine student and a Badminton Player, Maxime went on saying: “When I started Medicine it was harder to play, because I wasn`t use to combine the sport and studying. So I was able to play only 2 or 3 times a week. This was obviously shown last year, when I was playing the qualifying games to come to the Universiade, I almost missed the games only because my schedule at college was tight, and as we all know, the Professors at Med school don`t like students to be absent, which made them reject my request to take a few days off to go to the games, which ended up by me quitting school for that year.”

The 25 years-old Canadian Badminton player said that he always opens a bottle of Champagne after every win, but he promised that if he won a Golden Medal in the Universiade, he`ll buy Champagne for all of his friends, maybe the whole Canadian Delegation.

Mahmoud Khairy (EGY), FISU Young Reporter