Finally understand the critique I've been getting for the last 3 years

[Gerry Seymour]

I don't know. I think that if the "gotta win" crowd isn't in your bracket, more people might go to tournaments.

Going back to my baseball analogy, how many local softball leagues would there be if there was a law that required you to allow professional baseball teams to compete against you?

We're not talking about pros here. In some amateur leagues, you'll find a few teams that seem to dominate. They are usually the ones who take it more seriously, and actually train and practice. I don't know how you could keep individuals bracketed by their level of competitiveness.

 

[dvcochran]

I don't know. I think that if the "gotta win" crowd isn't in your bracket, more people might go to tournaments.

Going back to my baseball analogy, how many local softball leagues would there be if there was a law that required you to allow professional baseball teams to compete against you?



How is wanting to compete against people of similar level proving that I want a participation trophy? I just want an even match. Or a match where I don't spend 90% of it wondering why I even bothered when there's no chance.

There's a big difference between a 34 year old who is training for the Olympics, and an adult who is using martial arts to get back into shape after living a sedentary lifestyle for the last several years.



This is kind of the point that I'm making. The purpose is to demonstrate the principles you're learning. So you demonstrate them and lose...what does that prove about the principles? If you think about it, nothing. But the initial feeling is that you followed your training and lost.

I don't know. I think that if the "gotta win" crowd isn't in your bracket, more people might go to tournaments.

Going back to my baseball analogy, how many local softball leagues would there be if there was a law that required you to allow professional baseball teams to compete against you?



How is wanting to compete against people of similar level proving that I want a participation trophy? I just want an even match. Or a match where I don't spend 90% of it wondering why I even bothered when there's no chance.

There's a big difference between a 34 year old who is training for the Olympics, and an adult who is using martial arts to get back into shape after living a sedentary lifestyle for the last several years.



This is kind of the point that I'm making. The purpose is to demonstrate the principles you're learning. So you demonstrate them and lose...what does that prove about the principles? If you think about it, nothing. But the initial feeling is that you followed your training and lost.




Yes, there is beginner vs. beginner. But as you get to the more advanced, you have students with different amounts of hours in sparring training. Take a traditional school with 20% of the class going to WT sparring, and a sport focused school with 80% of the class going to WT sparring. In the red belt division (let's assume 2 years), you might have a traditional student with 50 hours of sparring training going up against a sport student with 200 hours of sparring training in class.

Is that a fair bracket? They're both red belts. But one has a clear training advantage over the other in this case.

And what skills are you trying to advance? Because you're not advancing your traditional Taekwondo skills. You're advancing your WT sparring skills. Which is only a small focus of your class, and you're not likely to go again for quite some time. By the time you go again, you'll be in a different bracket, and you'll probably have forgotten or not be able to apply the lessons you learned, because of the time and the change of division.

Quality vs. quantity applies here. Certainly quantity and repetition is a real value in the Ma's but sparring against the same group of people can lead to false confidence. One of the best values of tournaments is a real and relatively safe way to measure your sparring skill. Yes, WT sparring limits what strikes you can use but the speed and difficulty offsets this. There are other kinds of tournaments out there you know. I loved going to different tourneys. You want different go to a Kali or Chinese only tourney. ​

 

[Dirty Dog]

What percentage of the class is sparring vs. non-sparring? If it's 40%, then yes, 2 years of 40% is going to beat 6 months of 80%.

I don't track things that closely.

Is this guy one example, or a typical example? We have a few students that go and dominate. This one girl, every match I've seen her do in the 3 tournaments she's been to have been like 26-3 (give or take a few). A few others that have done very well. But we also have a lot of students that are out of their element when they do a tournament, and by the time we get to the next tournament the following year they've forgotten all the lessons they learned at the last one.

I'm not talking about a specific student. That was merely an example. When we do occasionally go to a tourney, we take a handful of students. They usually compete in multiple events (sparring, breaking, forms, etc). I cannot think of a single student who didn't medal in every event they entered, and gold is by far the most common color of those medals.

We've got 4 students who want to go to a tourney March 9th. Ask me about this after, and I'll let you know how each one does.