St. Albans Judo Club

This past weekend saw Sensei Jad, along with Samuel, Marcin, Bill & Jacob (& Daniel) head up to Warwickshire in order to deliver 13 judo tasters to a range of ages at the Festival of Sport.
From the initial ad-hoc enquiries on Friday afternoon thru the formal sessions of Saturday & Sunday we worked with almost 200 children & introduced them to some judo basics. With each group we covered a few fun animal moves, Ukemi, a Throw & a Hold, and even had time to play a quick game.
It was tiring, exceptionally hot (full sun all weekend)l & continuous hard work - Yet it was an AMAZING weekend, and we were absolutely delighted to have been asked to lead the sessions.

Well done to the small squad of club members who took part in the Shizentai Kata competition today, a great opportunity to demonstrate the hard work everyone's been doing.

🥇 Stratty & Alex - Senior Nage-no-kata
🥇John & Richard - Senior Itsutsu-no-kata
🥇Finn & Emily - Junior Nage-no-kata
🥉Emily & Finn - Junior Katame-no-kata

Also, well done to club member Patrick & his partner who were competing under Shizentai, who took Gold in the Junior Katame-no-kata

As always we've come away with more to work on as we prepare for the next event, but excellent efforts from everyone with improvements shining through for all pairs. 👍

On Sunday a large squad headed to Hatfield for the Shizentai Rumble.
Always an excellently run event & this year was no different, huge thanks to Shizentai Judo Club, and all the officials & supporters who helped make the event a great success.

We finished up with 41 competitors on the day, from the tiniest of our 5 year old dragons, through to a couple of our "slightly" older adults 😃

Everyone fought hard, and showed excellent determination and spirit. For several people this was their very first event, or their first in a new age band - really pleased to see how well people are progressing at all ages. 👍

(Participation)🏅 - Caelan & Anna - Excellent performances, but in larger groups meant unfortunately no placing today for these.
(Bronze) 🥉 - Elsie, Wan Yu, Emma, Marni, Maya, Asher, William S, Zachary, Finn, Sebastian, Jonathan, Thomas, Alexander, Tomas, Alfred, Barrack, Reuben, William B, Eryk, Lawrence, Vitorio, Lena, Isla D, Jaidan
(Sliver) 🥈 - Melina, Valerie, Meadow, Bethany, Elisa, Max, Grayson, Daniel, Adam, Theo
(Gold) 🥇- Emily, Danae, Lorcan, Darius, Elijah

Many thanks as always to my admin team for logging everything, to Steve J for his coaching support through out the morning, and to all the kids & parents for supporting everyone so well, 👏
----
A couple of our primaries appear to have escaped the photo call, and we completely missed getting a photo of our over 16s! (Sorry guys!)

Best of luck to everyone entered for the Shizentai Judo Club Rumble today. Looking forward to an exciting day of judo. Very proud of you all for giving it a go. 👍🍀

Last Saturday we held our Summer Grading, with almost 80 people being assessed. It was an excellent day with some great demonstrations of judo across all the ages groups, and evidence of a lot of hard work from everyone. Smiling faces, and new belts & tabs all-round.👏
As always my thanks to the background team that make these events flow so well, and ensure everyone gets the best experience. You are all amazing!
On refreshments & general support we had Liz, Jess & Dione, on the Admin desk we had Elinore & Nikki, and busy on the mat were my amazing coaching team of Steve J, John, Bill, Stratty, Richard, Kim, Ian P, Marcin, Freya & Muhammed.🎉

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!