Boards were broken, sparring matches were competed for and patterns were performed at the annual Estevan Taekwondo Club tournament.
There were several boards that were broken in the morning of the tournament, in a format they haven’t done in a long time.
“Thirty years ago, we used to do this when I was starting out,” said Wayne Brown with Estevan Taekwondo, at the event last Saturday in the Estevan Comprehensive School gym, where several clubs from across the province got together for the event. “Lately, the last little while we’ve down power-breaking, and a powerbreaker would do one (movement) with the foot (or) one with the hand. It’s basically a downward strike into a pile of boards or a back-kick into a pile of boards.
“This time, it allowed jumping, spinning, and it was much more pleasing to watch, as far as spectators seeing many different techniques.”
The tournament usually has between 100-110 competitors but only had about 80-85 this year.
“It’s going well and we’re down a little bit as far as numbers are concerned,” said Brown. “We had a couple of the other clubs in Saskatoon that had other things going on and even some of the other clubs just couldn’t commit to a full team.”
The tournament had smaller kids from about ages seven or eight up to adult black belts.
Estevan Taekwondo had a lot of names on the podium for both patterns and sparring.
“Obviously the Estevan club has more competitors than everybody else (here),” Brown said. “I would suspect that we took home a lot of medals in the (patterns) round.”
The club was set to go to a pair of tournaments this year in Saskatoon but they were cancelled so they haven’t gone to a tournament yet. They will go to a tournament in Saskatoon in January, and then provincials will also be there.
“Our club is planning and preparing to go to Toronto for the national competition there with Master (Vito) Palella, and that will be on March 30, (2019),” said Brown.
The club is planning to take as many students as possible to that event with Pallela, an eighth-degree black belt who is the national GTF president.
“A lot of it is going to be based on fundraising and interest,” he said. “Of course, when we do that, we take extra time and students have to be prepared to commit and dedicate themselves to extra training. We’ll have extra nights where we’ll just train for that particular event.”
Students need to be able to not only compete well, but also be able to put that extra effort in to get even better and sharper.
While the big competitions with extra training are one thing the club does, they also have regular taekwondo, and that has been going well this year.
“Our numbers are sitting around 80 students,” Brown said. “We had a big influx of new beginners. I think it was about 35, which is really nice to see. Then we always lose some as well… but it’s good. Our numbers are relatively stable and so that’s all we can ask for.”
