Stephen Glass, a freshman in biological sciences, joined the badminton club team this semester and is already beginning to see improvement in his game.

“I played around a little bit in high school, but I took badminton the P.E. class in the fall, and then I started hearing about the club, and I decided to check it out,” Glass said. “I’ve been playing a lot since then.”

Glass said he has turned a few of his friends on to the unusual game, with encouraging results.

“They’re kind of surprised I’m good at it,” he said. “I’ve actually brought a couple of them with me to practice, and my roommate liked it so much he signed up for the club.”

Glass said the game is much like tennis — both sports include singles and doubles, and the courts are very similar. But the game is played with a smaller ball, called a “shuttlecock,” and it does not follow tennis’s peculiar methods of scoring.

“Different rackets, different mediums, but the same kind of setup,” Glass said. “The scoring is a little different from tennis — it’s more like volleyball, with rally scoring, where you score on each point.”

The team, which can balloon from 10 to 30 members on any given night, practices every Friday and Sunday and participates in friendly matches against East Carolina, North Carolina and Duke every year. In recent years, the club has won roughly half of the games it has played.

“There are not very many good student players; most of our best players are alumni and faculty members,” club president Jason Tong, a graduate student in electrical engineering, said. “We’re hoping to get more students involved.”

Playing on State’s badminton team could possibly be described as a cultural experience. A majority of the club’s members are from China and India, but Taiwan, Thailand and Japan are also well represented.

“You get to meet people from all over, from all different countries,” Glass said. “Last Friday, I was playing doubles with a guy from France, and we were playing against two guys from Pakistan. It was really cool, to hear about their stories and stuff.”

In addition, the head coach of the Badminton team, Ken Hayman, is a native Australian. He was formerly a training squad member for the under-17 South Australian state team and has coached the Pack for nearly five years.

“Of late, we’ve had some pretty good success,” Hayman said of the team. “I’ve certainly seen an improvement in the level of play over the time I’ve been here.”

Hayman said the club relies on members telling their friends about the team.

“A lot of it is word of mouth,” Hayman said. “There’s also a fairly good number of people that play informally as well — the are usually plenty of people on the courts at Carmichael on Friday nights that just play for fun.”

Glass, for one, looks to the sport for a fun change of pace.

“It’s just something different to keep you active,” he said.