Badminton to the bone

Andrew Mathieson
THERE’S no hint of a giggle in the Sapwell household at the mention of shuttlecocks.
Badminton, to both Stan and Betty Sapwell, is serious stuff.
For more than 50 years, the now-retired couple has been bigger than the sport in Geelong.
Odds are if you’ve ever picked up a badminton racquet there’s an odds-on chance you would have looked across the net at either of them.
Stan, however, glowingly talks up his wife’s greater contribution ahead of his own.
“Betty would’ve been involved in badminton longer than anyone else in Geelong,” he boasts.
“If you had anything to do with badminton, you would have heard Betty Sapwell’s name.”
So much so that a new tearoom – the Betty Sapwell Lounge – had been named in her honour at Corio Leisuretime Centre.
The recent announcement was just the lift Betty needed in her life.
“I opened it one week, which was a complete surprise to me, and the next week I was in hospital having a breast cancer operation,” Betty explains.
“They didn’t know I was having the cancer problems and I didn’t know that they nominated me for the centre.”
Her contribution to badminton was first recognised nationally two decades ago with an Order of Australia Medal.
Seventy-five-year-old Betty began playing in her late teens and she still does to this day, socially at Belmont Activity Centre.
“Then I met Stan and Stan got dragged along and he had to play, too, didn’t he?” Betty says.
“We actually played before we were married and that was in 1954.”
Betty traces her first badminton games back “probably to the late ’40s”.
She started in the Unity-Sea Scouts competition before playing with Stan at Belmont Methodist.
Stan was later president of Geelong Badminton Association during great change.
He helped raised funds to ensure badminton had courts of “international quality” when Corio Leisuretime Centre opened in 1976.
Betty says such a luxury was not afforded to badminton players in the early years.
It was commonplace to play in church halls.
“They have nice stained glass windows, you played during the daytime and the sun used to shine through them,” Betty recalls.
“It was always an issue about which end you were going to have.”
Other venues, though, lacked space and the court
lines were almost drawn out the door or against walls.
“In another one at a picture theatre at Wallington we had to shift the seats before we could play,” Betty laughs.
She organised the first midweek ladies’ competition and years later got the Geelong juniors off the ground.
Betty had tremendous success with an elite Geelong squad that included Judy Nyirati, a former Australian champion.
Now Betty’s still in control of seven junior teams every Monday and Thursday night.
“Some of the children I coached years ago are now bringing back their children,” Betty laughs.
While badminton will always be her life, Betty admits others sometimes have greeted it with scepticism.
“I remember I said to one lady ‘Why don’t you come along and have a hit of badminton?’,” Betty remembers.
“She said that sounded all right. We got along to the church hall, got inside the door, she looks at the floor and says ‘Oh, it’s played here – I thought it was on a table’.”
The Belmont pair isn’t ready to walk away from their commitments just yet.
They’re now looking forward to the Geelong Badminton Association’s 60th anniversary celebrations in November this year.
“It won’t be because we’ve had enough of badminton – it’s because we’re physically unable to do it any more,” Betty says.
Stan reckons only divine intervention will end their time.
“What will happen is that the undertaker will go out to the leisuretime centre…,” he says, before they breakout in fits of laughter.