Four-leg badminton ranking series set

MANILA, Philippines –  A new badminton ranking tournament, a four-leg nationwide series aimed at determining the real strength of a player and at the same time discover fresh talents, will be fired off late this month with the country’s leading players and rising stars expected to see action.

Dubbed the Philippine Badminton Ranking System (PBaRS), the circuit will feature the singles, doubles and mixed doubles events for the Under-15, Under-19 and Open categories. It will kick off March 27-April 3 at Powersmash in Makati with the second and third legs slated May 29-June 4 in Bacolod and on July 31-Aug. 6 in Davao, respectively.

The event, sponsored by the MVP Sports Foundation-Goal Pilipinas, Bonanza Corp. and Yonex-Sunrise, will culminate in the VP Grand Prix Badminton Open Championships on Oct. 22-29 in Manila.

Registration is ongoing at the PBaRS office at 20 E. Maclang St. along P. Guevarra, San Juan. For details, contact 725-2568 or telefax 725-4942 or log on to www.pbars.com.

The series of tournaments is the initial project of the new Philippine Badminton Association now headed by Vice President Jejomar Binay, sports patron and business tycoon Manny V. Pangilinan and Rep. Albee Benitez in their effort to further raise level of play in the country and come up with a truly national ranking system.

The importance of the ranking is to measure the consistency of each player yearly. With the scheduled dates given at an early time, players can now train and excel on every leg, hence making the ranking more reliable, according to the organizers.

Under the system, the PBaRS will provide a clear and organized method of ranking players through the staging of a series of top-notch Open national tournaments where players can earn ranking points. This will give equal opportunity to players to compete and be recognized. The more tournaments to join, the more points are accumulated with each win, thus, top ranking players can now be objectively defined.

The classification of PBaRS tournaments will be based on the prize money of each event, such as P2.5 million (5-star), P1.5 million (4-star), P1 million (3-star), P800,000 (2-star) and P500,000 (1-star).