2016 is going to be a tough year for our competition teams with several big international events planned including European and World Championships in Karate and national level Judo events.
The Kyoji Kai Open was a Karate England ranking tournament with a wide spread of entries from very young ages to mature veterans. Our senior squad were competing elsewhere over that weekend, so it was left to our junior squad members to fly the flag.
As we’ve come to expect from our club, our students and coaches behaved with decorum, good etiquette and exhibited good sportsmanship throughout the event. We saw exhibited a couple of examples of poor behaviour and etiquette, for which there is never an excuse from competitor, coach or parent.
We had some great results with fellow Shikon member Tricia Jordan from SESK and Bryan winning Gokd in their respective veterans’ Kata sections and Mandi a Silver medal in Veterans. Louise Kelly 13 did extremely well to draw for 3rd Place in the 15-17 years category against experienced international competitors. We saw some exciting fights from one of our boys Kumite teams with Edward, Piotr and Tom winning three tough matches with very healthy scorelines and exciting techniques before losing in the semi finals to the winners.
Our competitor of the day was definitely Daniel Afitsinski winning a Silver medal in the 9-10 years boys Kata and then winning 4 matches in the 9-10 boys Kumite before getting beaten in the quarter finals against the winner of the category in extra time.
Karate Wales‘ Youth championships were our first event of the year, we had a good turnout for the team with members from both our junior and senior squad taking part.
The event was well organised by Rob Copeland and Lee Costa with representatives from all the home countries. We achieved good results in individual Kata and Kumite and also in Team Kumite, as a first for us we competed and won medals in pairs Kata for child and parent, we hope with some encouragement that for the next event, we will have more children and parent teams. Congratulations to all the team members who won medals at this event.
Special mention to Tom Kent for achieving his first individual medal.
We’re looking forward to returning to Wales in July for their National open event.