St. Albans Judo Club

After a fantastic day with our Dragons at the U8s event yesterday, we're back at Bishops Stortford today with a small group of Yellow & Orange belt Tigers & Wolves for the Green and Under competition.
Good luck everyone 🍀

Good luck today to a squad of U8s taking part in the Judo Festival at Bishops Stortford. The chaos of the warmup is done, on to the Randori pools. 👍🎉👍

Today we were busy at the BJC Open Nationals.

A great day of judo for our members, all showing great development & personal growth, many stepping out into this level of event for the first time.

Today wasn't the day for Danae, Nye & Muhammed, but all fought really well, and showed some good attacking judo.

Sadly we'll never know if Tim would have made it through his round one pool and into the final block as he had to withdraw with an injured foot after his 2nd fight, with 1 win already in hand.

Next we had🥉Bronze 🥉 medals for Anna, Halid, Isla, Maya, Archie & Alexander, lots of positive judo, great scores & some good wins.

Then finally we are delighted to have 3 new BJC National Champions at the club, after some excellent fights leading to 🥇Gold 🥇 medals today for Max, Elisa & Henry (Hatfield).

Well done everyone for your brilliant work today & for representing the club so well your behaviour & attitude on & off mat. I'm really proud of all of you.

Thank you to all the parents for bringing them & staying to offer great support to all our team. It was really lovely to have so much support right through to the final groups.

Finally thank you to Samuel for coming along with me & running about to make sure everyone had lots of support whilst they fought.

I love days like this, which show ongoing the growth & development of the club, and the hard work everyone is putting in. (I also get to catch up and chat with old friends 😀)

All the best to Zac & Jaidan who are taking part in the East London Adaptive Competition today!

We met a monkey, who's a lot bigger than ours!

First grading of the year yesterday, 3 sessions of assessments, over 7 hours, with ages 5 through 40+ taking part - Final result = 84 new grades awarded.
👏Well done to all of you. 👏

Huge thanks as always to the whole of the Volunteer team:- the Coaches & Assistants on the mat, Check-in & Top Table handling the paperwork, and the Kitchen workers making sure everyone was looked after all day.
🌟It can't work without you and your efforts are massively appreciated.🌟

(Apologies to the tall people in the bottom picture - I had to chop your heads off to get all the Dragons in, hope you don't mind 😂)

It's been a busy weekend for the club, with members taking part in 2 competitions on Saturday & the BJC National Kata tournament on Sunday.
Really well done to everyone that took part in all the events. And also, not pictured, to Samuel who donned his suit & tie to Referee at one of the competitions.

Results on Saturday:
NHC Orange & Under
Bronzes for Isla, Aillie, Emma & Ettiene
No podium place this time around for Max, Bethany, & Emily.
An excellent effort from everyone, in a tough competition and with several starting in new age/grade bands.

NLA Basho
Silvers for Archie & Patrick (Shizentai)
Well done to both boys for these great results.

And for Sunday at the BJC Kata it was a clean sweep of Golds across the team!
Snr Nage-no-kata: John & Marcin
Jnr Katame-no-kata (8-11s): Finn & Emily
Snr Itsutsu-no-kata: Richard & John
Snr Kime-no-kata: Bob & Ricky (Shizentai)
Snr Kodokan Goshin Jutsu: Richard & Ricky (Shizentai)

A brilliant performance from everyone! Particular shout out to our 2 youngsters in their first Kata competition, showing some excellent technique & control.

Busy day at the National Training Centre in Walsall for Zac, Theo & Jaiden along with coaches Jad & Samuel.

Well done for your hard work & focus, and our thanks to all the coaches & players for such a fantastic session!

Congratulations to our members who took part in the great training session run by Northern Home Counties Area at HWJC on Saturday.

Excellent effort & lots of hard work from Nok, Max, Emma, Tim, Grayson, Sebastian, Patrick, Jaidan, Lindsay, George, Henry, Etienne & Samuel. 👏👍

(With apologies to those group two, your camera operator failed you 🤣)

And just like that the Club's judo for 2025 comes to an end!

We finished off the year with a grading for our latest cohort of Adult beginners, who've all worked hard over the past 12 weeks, deservedly earning their 5th Kyu (Yellow Belt).
(With a couple more still to do in Jan who've already headed off for the holidays)

Welcome to the end of the beginning guys, and we look forward to you joining us at the wider club sessions in the new year 👍👍

🎉Well now that was CHAOS! 🎉
An absolutely 🎄brilliant🎄last night of the year for all our youngsters yesterday, with over 120 taking part across the 3 sessions. At our busiest point during the u13s session, we had 85 people on the mat - including a Dinosaur, and I don't mean me!

Huge, huge "thank yous" to everyone who supported the night both on and off the mat - herding cats has nothing on trying to organise 75+ extremely over excited kids! Admin, Coaches & Young Helpers - You Rock! 👍

In particular I want to give a really big shoutout to 🌟Liz🌟 for all her hard work both in advance and during the evening, sorting out all the food, preparing all the sweet cones for the kids, and just generally keeping the kitchen flowing for everyone.👏

It was also great to a visit from a couple of our older teens who left us for Uni this year, hope to see you back again in the next Holidays 🙂

Photos, from this other events this year, thanks to Valeria & Bill 👍

One last session for Adults tonight, including the wrap up of this terms Beginners Course, then it's time for a relaxing couple of weeks before everything zooms back into motion in January.