Part
3 of the black belt exam held on 5/7/16
After all of the one steps the
students got to spar. This I feel is an
important and fun part of the exam, but I don’t believe it is by no means the
most important. Personally I feel that
many schools use the sparring as the way to say we are tough and our students
are tough; so a requirement is set that you must spar for X amount of
rounds. I see my students spar in
school every week, I know which ones are tough and I know the ones who don’t
care for it but still do it. For them
it is a struggle just to get out and do it, and for whatever reason they don’t
enjoy it. Not liking sparring doesn’t
mean they don’t like training, that they are wimps or anything of the sort, they
just don’t care for hitting others for prolonged periods.
So we do spar, if we have a
large test the students get to fight a lot, if we have a small test they get to
fight some matches and I waive requirements such as multiples and endless
rounds of sparring. In this exam I
waived the multiples and instead Bryce, Kimberly, Olivia and Kaitlyn all got to
padded weapon spar. In padded weapon
sparring the students choose a weapon and then face off against their opponent and
go after it. Sometimes the students
choose the same weapon such as the escrima sticks and sometimes they choose
unequal weapons such as the nunchaku (flail or flexible weapon) vs. bo
(staff). You know while some of the
kids don’t like to spar, they have no problem hitting each other with padded
weapons, even though they are wearing less gear and the weapons hurt more. Go figure.
Bringing it back around to why
I believe things haven’t changed much since that first test 32 years ago. Back then we still sparred, my students
still had to do one steps for their belt.
Self-defense was still an important part of the exam. When sensei Proctor told Holly to defend
herself against David (my roommate) he just wanted to see her win, he didn’t
care how, it was simply to win. So she
hit him a few times to loosen his grip and then threw him to the ground BOOM! A much smaller person defeated the bigger
person.
Likewise, now after earning
black belt rank in five systems, teaching here at the Rec. Center for nine
straight years, raising several students to black belt rank, etc. etc. I still
focus on trying to have the student learn to defend themselves and I really
care more about that part of the art than how high they can kick, how many
trophies they won, how loud they can scream, or how many rounds they fight.
After our first black belt exam sensei
Proctor told me “Mark, your kids did real good. I could pick apart their kata,
I could pick apart their sparring, but their self defense was great. And that is really the way it should
be.” After this test he told me once
again that the kids did great and “their self-defense was still
excellent”. And that is really the way
it should be.