The Hanmadang

The Hanmadang!  What is a Hanmadang?  Well, honestly I don't know what the word means, but its an in house tournament at the Alpha Tae Kwon Do school where I take my Goju Ryu classes.

Wait a minute I take Goju Ryu Karate classes at a Tae Kwon Do School?  Well yeah.  The chief instructor of the school, Andrew Rollinson (who also owns the school with his wife Michelle), is also studying a number of other martial arts and bringing them into his school.  So he is studying Goju Ryu under the auspices of Hanshi Bernard from the House of the Samurai up in Londonderry, NH, he is also studying Kobudo through that school.  As part of that relationship Shihan Dan Sidlik comes down to Alpha and helps us in our in Kobudo and Goju on Saturdays.  On top of that Sensei Rollinson is also studying Hapkido through a different school (sorry I'm not sure of the name of that school).

At any rate so this past weekend was the Hanmadang at Alpha.  The big annual in house tournament.  With some encouragement from Sensei Rollinson, and from my son (who is a Tae Kwon Do student at the same school).  I figured I'd do forms and sparring.  I was pretty nervous going in, I mean I had only been doing Karate again for a year or so, and it had been 25 years since I'd done a Karate tournment.  Just to make things even more interesting I was the only Goju student competing in forms and sparring.  So I was up against a slew of Tae Kwon Do students, this was going to be interesting.

First up, my son's events in forms, breaking boards and sparring.  Eric does great at forms.  He's got a great memory, a good attention to detail, and he has great posture when he does his forms.  He does a good job overall, and places second in his group out of four other students.  Sweet! That's my boy!

Next is his board breaking.  He was doing a flying side kick, a side kick, and a front kick to break the boards.  The flying side kick he breaks no problem.  The side kick gives him some trouble,  after three kicks he he fails to break it.  I don't think he was standing close enough to the board, oh well.  Well just have to come up with a fun way to break the board at home.  Then onto front kick which he does no problem.  He ends up finishing below the top two in that one.  He comes out of ring a little sad, but then I make the joke that maybe we'll break the board with our head at home.  He laughs at that and is back to his normal self.  I'm so proud of my little man!

Then onto sparring.  Eric does great at sparring, but he has two bad tendency's.  Fi rst he tends to stop and look to the judges when he thinks he's scored a point.  So he ends up giving up some points when he does that.  Second he tries to score with punches, and the judges at TKD don't call points on punches as often as they do on kicks.  He only loses a single match, but it was his first unfortunately.  So he didn't place in the top two, but he did great overall.  Better than I could do at that age!

Okay, Eric's done, now its my turn.