Newsday's Athlete of the Week is Madie Diemer of St. Anthony's girls badminton

Madie Diemer remembers her last loss.

It was a predictable script, really. A sophomore, who just picked up competitive badminton a few months prior, loses to a more experienced player. But, here’s where the script turns — that sophomore, now a senior about to graduate and leave Long Island behind for the west coast, would never lose again.

It sounds like a pretty cool badminton movie — maybe something that Diemer, who will be studying film and television writing at the University of Southern California next fall, will write someday. But, for now, it’s just a story based on actual events.

Diemer, a St. Anthony’s senior, just completed her second consecutive undefeated season, going 28-0 in the last two seasons and winning back-to-back CHSAA badminton singles championships. She is the back-to-back winner of the Karen Andreone Memorial MVP Award, given to the most outstanding player in the CHSAA and named after the longtime Our Lady of Mercy athletic director and badminton coach who died in 2021.

Now, Diemer is Newsday’s Athlete of the Week.

 “I really love the sport,” Diemer said. “I never played before I tried out sophomore year, except for with friends at a barbecue. You don’t think of it as a ‘real sport,’ but then I played it and I thought ‘oh my gosh, this is going to be my favorite thing.’ ”

While winning quickly became a rerun, it never got old. The more it happened, the more she wanted it. Complacency was never an issue, keeping the streak alive and a constant strive for perfection made every match a cliffhanger.

“The more I won, the more anxious I got that I was going to lose and ruin my streak,” said Diemer, who hopes to play on USC’s club team. “I feel like I was getting better, but I was almost thinking a little too much. I would get into my head a little bit and have to come back.”

It was the opposite of complacency.  St. Anthony’s coach Jen Roveto, who by the end of Diemer’s high school career was coaching an athlete who literally never lost, would marvel at her unrelenting self-awareness.

“Let me tell you, coaching her in between Game 1 and Game 2 is the joy of my life,” Roveto said. “You walk over to the court and she literally says to me all the things she did wrong. She could have won by 10 or 11 points, but she has all these things that she wants to work on.”

But, once she got past those initial jitters, Diemer would settle in and, inevitably, go home with a win, and some bruises.

“(She’ll) throw her body to the floor of a gym court without even thinking twice to get every last shot,” Roveto said. “I’ve never seen someone’s arms bend the way this kid’s arms do. She’ll leave a badminton court with skinned knees, if it means getting that last birdie in.”