St. Louis Tournament and Testing Recap

As usual, the competition in St. Louis this year was intense. Lots of tough competitors attend this tournament. Also as usual, even though we had few competitors, we acquitted ourselves well.

For our school, the weekend began with Blackbelt Testing on Friday evening. We had three students testing, JKN Anna Dodd, began testing for Second Degree Blackbelt, and DBNs Pam and Katie Turner logged another test towards their First Degree Blackbelt. The test was just about two hours and was a little different from previous headquarters tests. Still, it was both physically and mentally challenging and gave everyone involved a good sense of where they stand and how much more practice they still need.

The next day, Saturday, was the tournament itself. Team KSWoM came away with a very respectable 12 medals collectively! JKN Anna Dodd received third place in Staff Form. DBN Pam Turner received first place in Forms, Techniques, Staff Spinning, and Breaking, and fourth place in Sparring. DBN Katie Turner received third place in Techniques and Staff Spinning, and fourth place in Sparring. Blue Belt David Spell received second place in Forms, third place in Techniques, and fourth in Sparring.

I did a little math, and if you extrapolate the points per person that we accumulated, we would have done very well with the numbers of competitors that other schools took with them (fifty competitors at that rate would have put us in third place overall in the school rankings.)

I’m not ruling out attending the Midwest Tournament next year, but we are definitely planning to attend the East Coast tournament in early April. It will be held in (or near) Washington, D.C. Shil Jang Nim Krystal is already planning the trip. If anyone is interested in doing a D.C. sightseeing trip with us, please contact her. I would rather do the sightseeing after the tournament so that we don’t miss valuable training time, but we’ll see what she comes up with.