The De Anza College badminton team looks to continue its success in 2016 and win a championship after coming up short in 2015.

Head Coach Mark Landefeld said this team is different from previous years, as this year’s team is much smaller with only two players returning.

“It’s going to be one of our smaller teams,” Landefeld said. “If we include redshirts, I think we’re up to nine or ten players right now.”

One of the returning players, Loc Nguyen, said she hopes this team can do well even though they’ve never played in a team atmosphere.

Landefeld said most of the girls are international, so he’s looking for how quickly they gel as a unit.

With such a new team this year and the season not yet started, coach Landefeld is focused on developing some of the freshman talent.

The freshmen include Elita Murtanu from Irvington High in Fremont, Tiffany Liao who is an international student and Vanessa Nazareno from Oak Grove High school in San Jose.

“We have some pretty good players this year,” Liao said. “If we can, we definitely want to win a state championship.”

With very little practice time due to the basketball team’s schedule and not many scrimmages going on, the team has only managed to attend one tournament at San Jose State.

“We’ve taken our doubles team out to the San Jose State tournament and Elita and Vanessa did very well,” Landefeld said. “We’re looking for them to be our number one doubles team.”

The team has recently doubled its practice time from two days to four days in order to get better prepared for the quickly approaching season.

The season starts tough for the Dons. They face Pasadena City College who is heavily favored to win the state championship. If they manage to come out of that game with any sort of success, expect this year’s badminton team to go deep once again and make a run at the CCCAA state championship.