In my post about de Dutch Championship I told about a friend of mine, Mireille van Daal. She plays badminton on a high level. A couple of weeks ago I said to her that if I had nothing to do, I would come at the Dutch Junior. 

It was Wednesday 25 February 2009 and I was getting ready to go to the station when I heard about a airplane crash near airport Schiphol. It was on my way to Haarlem. So I looked next to me with the photocamera in my hand to make pictures if I saw the airplane.
Before I did that, I was annoyed by the train. I had to switch trains two times, but the first time I wanted to switch… the train was a couple of minutes late. So I almost missed the other train too.
I didn’t see the airplane and I arrived at the Dutch Junior. The skillevel of the junior pro’s is unknown to me and I was suprised.  I didn’t think it was nice to look at it and I thought that it would be boring. I was wrong.
They are the future of badminton!
Unfortunately, Mireille lost her match. She made too much mistakes.
I enjoyed the matches and it was time to go home. I hadn’t have problems with the train this time.

My friend, Kelly, asked me to go with her to the place where the airplane crashed. It was Thursday 26 February 2009. I had vacation and I went with Kelly to that place. We looked like tourists, but we weren’t the only tourist.
Too bad, the plane was too far away and there wasn’t a way to come closer. I took some pictures and we could see the airplane on my photocamera. We had to wait 30 minutes on the way back. I took pictures of airplanes in the air and I had some fun with Kelly.
I don’t think I’m going to forget this day. I’ve never seen an airplane crash before.

Four boys, of the club where I play badminton, were breaking a record playing badminton on Friday 27 February 2009
They had to play 24 hours and 22 minutes for breaking the old record. But those boys  played 27 hours badminton and I don’t think that they were playing “campington”. I went Friday to see how they were doing it and I never thought they would break the record. I really have respect for them.

I went to the Dutch Junior on Saturday 28 February 2009. I wasn’t supporting anyone, but I was going to linejudge. I woke up earlier than normal and I though it would be a problem. The train was on time and I didn’t have any problems. I was happy to see the other linejudges again.
It would be a long day. We started at 10.00 a.m. and the last match was planned on 7.40 p.m. I started with the first match. They started with the mixdouble. I had to linejudge two matches and than I was a match free.
The matches were during between 20 and 40 minutes. In the beginning I had more matches with two games but in the quarterfinales all the matches were three games.
When the quarterfinales started, I was getting tired. Maybe I had to go to sleep earlier the evening before. I wasn’t concentrated so much anymore and a result of that was that I gave a wrong call. I was very sorry, but I’m just a human and making mistakes is something normal. After that happened, I woke up a little bit and I linejudged correctly the rest of the day.
A remarkable thing was how the junior pro’s yelled when they made a point. Sometimes I thought I was in a chicken coop.
After all I had a nice day and it was a good foretaste for my trip to Milan in April this year. I look forward to the matches there!

I made a lot of pictures this week and I enjoyed the badminton matches: