The 2007 KLRC New Zealand Open proved to be one of the best NZ Opens yet. The level of the players and the size of the crowds haven't been seen in NZ for many years.

This was the first time that Badminton NZ and KLRC had joined forces to hold the NZ Open and with a great team giving up endless hours to make it a success.

The venue for this year's event was the Auckland Badminton Centre approximately 10 minutes drive from the Auckland city centre.

Auckland is a long way for players to travel to a tournament, but it's the begining of the Olympic qualifying period and there were valuable world ranking points available so the organiser were rapt at the size the internationally ranked entry list.

A new concept was also introduced for the KLRC NZ Open with the availability of  z-cam.  Live  web-cam  screenings  of the tournament would allow people from around the world to log in and watch many of the high quality matches. This was a trial for the tournament and they hope to have it available again in the future.

Many thought the early rounds would run smoothly with no major upsets, but this was not to be. New Zealand supporters were hoping that Kiwi Daniel Shirley and Malaysian  partner  Joanne  Quay  -  top seeds  for  this  tournament,  would  still be in through to the finals weekend, but they were beaten by a very determined and  fired  up  NZ  pair  of  Craig  Cooper and Renee Flavell.  2006 Ladies Singles Champion  Huang  Chia  Chi  (AUS)  was drawn to play Zhou Mi in the first round but withdrew due to illness.

This   tournament   is   also   a   great opportunity for many young NZ players to watch and play against some world class players. The very rarely get to see so many good players in NZ and compete against them and also see the NZ team players competing in an International event.

On  quarter  finals  night  the  organisers were turning spectators away as all tickets were sold out for the session. Crowds packed into the Auckland Badminton Hall to watch many of the top quality matches on show, including the clash between the new kid on the block Andre Tedjono from Indonesia  and  highly  ranked  Malaysian and no. 4 seed Roslin Hashim, which the young Indonesian took in 2 very close sets. Top seed Andrew Smith (England) made his exit as did Chan Yan Kit (HK), but the game of the night was definitely the match with Wong Choong Hann (Malaysia) and Alamsyah Yunus  (Indonesia). The game took just under one hour and had the local supporters on their feet cheering for their favourite player. Eventually it was Wong who managed to get through this very entertaining game 22-20 in the third.

In the ladies singles Zhou Mi  (HK) and Pi Hongyan  (France) continued to show their class winning through comfortably, but Tracey Hallam (England) came close to beat the  2nd seed, Yip Pui Yin  (HK) with the longest ladies match of the night. Once again the  3rd set was very close