MetalBoar
Black Belt
As you may have read in another post, I recently moved to the Phoenix area and I was thinking about what @dvcochran and a couple of other people were saying about only having 2-3 schools in their towns. I'm not ready to start with a new school yet, with covid at a peak and Arizona being one of the worst places for it, but I have started looking at what is available near me in my new home for when it is a good time to get back into things.
I started out just Googling for martial art schools in general, knowing that I'd be missing a number of places that didn't have web sites or were just bad at getting noticed by Google. This got me too many results to really even start to narrow things down. Next I decided I'd look at schools within 30 minutes of my house - still too many to really evaluate so I cut it back to places within a 15 minute drive (plus maybe 1-2 minutes if it was an art I'm really interested in) and just opened them all up in their own tabs. That helped but wasn't yet manageable.
Next, I just closed all the Tai Chi tabs because I now live in the land of retired folks and it seems like every community center, health club, and exercise venue is offering some variation on "Tai Chi for Health!" and I didn't even want to get started trying to sort through all that. Even though there were a number of Aikido schools that looked reputable I cut them all out because I've done a lot of Aikido and related arts and it isn't what I'm looking for right now. Then I cut the kenpo/kajukenbo schools for similar reasons. Modern Wushu was next to go, unless they explicitly offered Sanda/Shuai Jiao classes. At that point I spent a little time looking at the remaining sites and arbitrarily closed any school's tab that looked like it was focused on kids classes or just fitness, was too self aggrandizing, didn't tell me about the instructor, or used one of the generic, boiler plate web site designs that you can find in every city for every art. I'm guessing there were some good schools that got dropped in the process but you've got to start somewhere.
After all that I'm down to an even 20 schools on my list to check out, which still seems like a lot to visit once the 'rona is over, or even to just post on here and ask for people's opinions. I'm left with 5 BJJ schools that look good to my inexpert eye, 3 MMA gyms of varying flavors, 3 Wing Chun schools, 2 Okinawan Karate dojos (1 seems questionable and almost failed my "Self Aggrandizing" filter but I've been interested in traditional Okinawan Karate for a while so I left it in ), 2 Judo dojos, 1 Sanda school, 1 Muay Thai school, 1 TKD school, 1 Capoeira, and 1 catch wrestling school. Some of these schools teach other arts that I have a lesser interest in as well. None of this includes a Xing Yi school that I want to check out, @geezer for Wing Chun and FMA, the Filipino MA clubs that I've been looking at, or a couple of other places that are outside my 15 minute limit that I might be willing to drive a little extra to try out.
I'm not complaining but it's hard to know where to start!
I started out just Googling for martial art schools in general, knowing that I'd be missing a number of places that didn't have web sites or were just bad at getting noticed by Google. This got me too many results to really even start to narrow things down. Next I decided I'd look at schools within 30 minutes of my house - still too many to really evaluate so I cut it back to places within a 15 minute drive (plus maybe 1-2 minutes if it was an art I'm really interested in) and just opened them all up in their own tabs. That helped but wasn't yet manageable.
Next, I just closed all the Tai Chi tabs because I now live in the land of retired folks and it seems like every community center, health club, and exercise venue is offering some variation on "Tai Chi for Health!" and I didn't even want to get started trying to sort through all that. Even though there were a number of Aikido schools that looked reputable I cut them all out because I've done a lot of Aikido and related arts and it isn't what I'm looking for right now. Then I cut the kenpo/kajukenbo schools for similar reasons. Modern Wushu was next to go, unless they explicitly offered Sanda/Shuai Jiao classes. At that point I spent a little time looking at the remaining sites and arbitrarily closed any school's tab that looked like it was focused on kids classes or just fitness, was too self aggrandizing, didn't tell me about the instructor, or used one of the generic, boiler plate web site designs that you can find in every city for every art. I'm guessing there were some good schools that got dropped in the process but you've got to start somewhere.
After all that I'm down to an even 20 schools on my list to check out, which still seems like a lot to visit once the 'rona is over, or even to just post on here and ask for people's opinions. I'm left with 5 BJJ schools that look good to my inexpert eye, 3 MMA gyms of varying flavors, 3 Wing Chun schools, 2 Okinawan Karate dojos (1 seems questionable and almost failed my "Self Aggrandizing" filter but I've been interested in traditional Okinawan Karate for a while so I left it in ), 2 Judo dojos, 1 Sanda school, 1 Muay Thai school, 1 TKD school, 1 Capoeira, and 1 catch wrestling school. Some of these schools teach other arts that I have a lesser interest in as well. None of this includes a Xing Yi school that I want to check out, @geezer for Wing Chun and FMA, the Filipino MA clubs that I've been looking at, or a couple of other places that are outside my 15 minute limit that I might be willing to drive a little extra to try out.
I'm not complaining but it's hard to know where to start!
