Carol Kadingo has been the Fresno City College Women’s Badminton head coach since 2000.
What makes Coach Kadingo different is that she has never competitively played badminton. However, she is definitely no stranger to coaching. Kadingo has been coaching and teaching since 1977.
Kadingo is originally from Pennsylvania where she first started coaching volleyball at a branch college campus of Penn State. While she was content with coaching volleyball, she felt that there was more that she could accomplish. “I felt like I was still moving through the ranks, I was still looking for that really great job, even though I wasn’t expecting to leave Pennsylvania as soon as I did, ” she said.
Kadingo found a listing for an open position as head coach of the women’s basketball team at FCC. “I liked the difference in schools, the branch school that I was at had a little over 400 students and in comparison to FCC’s thousands of students, I thought ‘I like this. This could be a challenge,'” she said.
Kadingo was the head coach of the women’s basketball team at FCC from 1984-1992. During her eight years as head coach, the women’s basketball team made five regional appearances.
After coaching basketball, Kadingo had a seven year period when she did not coach. Then, the FCC athletic director at the time asked Kadingo if she would be interested in coaching the women’s badminton team. She said, “At first I was really reluctant to take the position because I had never played myself, and I didn’t feel like I could do the job from a competitive stand point. However, I have been able to do it with the tremendous help that my assistant coaching staff has brought along.”
In the transition from coaching basketball to coaching badminton, Kadingo admitted that she struggled with the completely different nature that each sport had. “I had trouble going along with the more relaxed nature of the practices. In basketball there were so many different things that we would do every minute of every practice, but the good thing about badminton is that you don’t need the entire team here to be able to practice. We can work individually with the girls on footwork, drives, or smashes to make them better.” Kadingo said.
“Right now, I have great assistant coaches, Ray Tijahadi and Benedictus “Benny” Azali. They have a tremendous amount of expertise in badminton. I really let them run practice and then we come back together and corroborate as coaches on the players and the team,” Kadingo said.
Currently, the badminton team is 2-2 in conference play and there are only two returning players on the team.
Right now, Coach Kadingo says that the singles teams are stronger than the doubles teams, “There are a lot of new people that are working together and personalities really become a factor because they have to really meld together in order to do well.”
The biggest challenge that Coach Kadingo says she faces in coaching badminton is working with the fact that badminton is not a sport that is started with girls at a young age. “Most of the girls start in high school or when they come here and play.”
“Most girls who come through the program,” she says, “have only started playing badminton in high school and there is a major difference in competition level from high school to college.
“When they finally start getting really good, their two years is up and the rotation starts again,” Coach Kadingo said.
While badminton is a sport that receives very little media attention and very little respect for its true competitive nature, Coach Kadingo and the women of the badminton team disagree with the reputation of badminton being an “easy” or “lazy” sport.
“Badminton requires a lot of muscle memory, movement, footwork, hand-eye coordination, and a player’s response and reaction time must be quick in order to compete,” Coach Kadingo said.
Player Manjot Pandher said, “Most people think this is easy, but we have to run so much and people think it’s easy and it’s such a small space to play in, but we run a lot.”
“While we are happy about our wins, we cannot get too confident. For instance, our win against Mission College was great,” Coach Kadingo said. “But they also didn’t bring their no. 1 seed, no. 2, or no. 4, so our no. 1 ended up playing their no. 3, our no. 2 ended up playing their no. 5 and so on. So, when we go to play at Mission College we will probably have more of a challenge.”
Coach Kadingo said, “Together, we’re trying to strive to be better players and have a good experience, we’re not the most popular or most well-known sport, but the girls have a good time with it.”
Overall, Coach Kadingo said that she would like to win every match, but “realistically, I would like to see us continue to improve in order to make us stronger.”
