Last night we had our second demo practice and it was far
better than our first for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the
number of students who decided to participate in the upcoming demo. For that I need to thank both the students
and their parents for carving out more time out of their schedules to practice
and to parents for driving the students to practices.
We have been asked to participate in an event called “Rockin
At The Ranch!” on Sunday May 5th located at the Bedford Boy’s Ranch,
which starts at 10am and runs till 6:00pm.
Now our school’s part in this event is admittedly small we are one
small part of the entertainment for the crowd and our part is only from
12:30-1:00pm. “Rockin at the
Ranch” is a fund raiser for Third Tradition Charities a non profit 501c3
organization benefiting multiple charities; so when I was asked to have our
school do a demo to help out I readily agreed.
However to be truthful as much as I wanted to help out it
was not without some hesitation because to do a demo I needed to have students
and parents step up and want to take part and we didn’t have a “DEMO TEAM” of
students who were all ready practiced and ready to go. Plus I’m not the flashy demo kind of a
teacher and I don’t really teach the flashy demo stuff. However; last night’s practice had me feeling
excited that we are putting together a small demonstration to help out at this
event. It also made me believe that we
can and hopefully will do future demos at other events.
Our first practice we had three students show up, while it
was a good start and I was thankful for their courage to step up, last night at
our second practice we had nine plus Kevin, Jackie and I. While it was still hectic I believe the
practice went well. After asking who
wanted to do what for the demo, I then sectioned them off to the other room to
work under Jackie and Kevin’s supervision and I stayed in the our regular room
to work with our students doing Kobudo and the higher kata.
When I was asking who wanted to do what, two students asked
to do things that aren’t in their normal Tae Kwon Do program, but are in my
Modern Arnis program. I have encouraged
cross training between programs and I sometimes blend in some self defense from
the Modern Arnis over to the Tae Kwon Do, but I hadn’t expected Matthew to
announce he wanted to do a double stick drill (that he had only be shown or
worked on a couple of times in class). His type of enthusiasm is what we look for so
I handed him off to Jackie to work double sticks. Brooke who has become our resident kata/anyo
(encyclopedia) wanted to do two empty hand Green belt katas, one from Tae Kwon
Do and the other from Modern Arnis.
Brooke’s ability to absorb and perform kata is very special, she not
only knows her Tae Kwon Do forms up through Purple belt, but also the first two
Modern Arnis forms and her Nunchaku kata, she keeps all of this sorted out in
her head, even though she’ll be testing for her Blue belt the weekend following
the demo.
Two students wanted to do the Nunchaku so Isaiah is doing
the kata Nunchaku Ni (or the Nunchaku #2 kata) and Hunter is going to do one
steps with the Nunchaku against the Bo, which I’ll probably be doing with him. Isaiah has fire when he does the kata, when
he is on, he does it like it is real to him.
Hunter being one of my senior students has the technique and control
needed to do the one steps without hurting the feeder.
The twins Rod and Z are going to do Yul Gok kata
synchronized, which I’m glad to see since both are good dedicated students and
good technicians. These two students come
four classes per week, sometimes even doubling up on class in order to help
out, they are great Blue belts. Leilani
is going to do Hwa Rang kata and be Kate’s partner for one steps. Kate has chosen to do one steps and self
defense. Bryce stepped up and is going
to do Kwan Gae kata which in our system is a 2nd Dan (2nd
degree black belt) form. I picked Bryce
to learn this kata; even though he is still a 3rd brown because of
his kicking skills and last night we worked on this form together for the first
time in months. He remembered it better
than I did but he (we) were (are) still rusty on the kata. After classes last night, I stayed late to
run over the kata again and again so I could get back into the swing of things
with it.
Kevin had the great idea of the crowd drill, so if you heard
a bunch of chaos (loud noise) coming from room it was actually part of
practice. The crowd drill is designed to
make the student focus on the task at hand instead of getting sucked into the
distraction of the crowd. So the crowd
which is all of the student who aren’t performing make crowd noise when the
student is demonstrating their kata, one steps or what have you. Now I thought the students and the adults
might talk amongst themselves while the student was doing their part of the
demo to make crowd noise, but was I wrong.
The first student got up there and all of the sudden I hear “POP CORN,
PEANUTS,” “Hey can I have a Coke with that!!!”, sticks banging on the floor like drums,
clapping, yelling, and basically LOUD crowd noise. WOW what a difference that made! The kids really got into it and it was
distracting, I know it first hand because it was hard for me to stay focused
when feeding Hunter the Bo strikes for his one steps. Kevin was pleased that Brooke finally cracked
a smile doing her kata because as he said she was like a machine when only a
couple of the students were the crowd, which validated to him that the drill
was working.
I can’t express how proud I was of the students as they got
up and performed their skills during the crowd drill. Special mention goes to Jackie and Matthew,
because Matthew not only did Single Sinawali, but he also did Single Sinawali
Advanced and Advanced 2 with foot work changes.
Under Jackie’s guidance they put together a really nice little part of
the demo that show cases his and her skills in a quick 30 minute work out, and
during the crowd drill he stayed focused and to the normal observer he never
missed a beat. This is worth special
mention because he had never learned these drills with footwork and only worked
on the hand motions of Single Sinawali (the basic drill) once or twice in
class, also he had never worked with another adult; pretty good for a 9 year
old blue belt.
After the kids were done at 7:30pm Kevin Jackie and I worked
on the Modern Arnis portion of the demo.
Kevin and I went over and worked out a single stick drill that is
choreographed by putting together different pieces of drills, but seems like a
stick sparring match. Jackie and Kevin
will be doing a double stick flow drill that is an enhanced version of what
Jackie worked with Matthew on. Then I
think Jackie and I will be doing empty hand flow drills. After all of this I stayed later and worked
some on Kwan Gye, so I would ready for Bryce tonight.
It was a very productive night and our next two Demo work
outs will be next Monday and Wednesday nights at 6:30 -7:30pm as we get ready for the demo next week end.