Sunday 28th November saw the first Combined Regional Area Grading since Covid started take place at St Albans Judo Club. These regional gradings are a chance for those who are green belt (3rd Kyu) and above to grade. It’s a chance for those who are on youth grades to convert to senior grades. The grading saw people from various clubs such as Luton, Chalfont, St Albans, Shizentai, Barnet and as far a field as Southampton attending. From Barnet, we had three members attend this grading, Luke, Sebastian and Mark.
Thank you to Riki, Aga, Piri, Lukasz, Kaya, Alex and the parents who were there supporting our members and helping coach where possible.
Luke and Sebastian
I am going to combine Luke and Sebastian as they ended up in the same pool together, and worked together for their technical demonstration. These two knew that they might end up having to face each other on the mat and fortunately for them, it was the first round. This meant they got it out the way early on.
This first round proved to be the only round that neither won, with no score on the board, it was declared a draw between them. After this, both Luke and Sebastian went on to win all their remaining rounds with dominant performances on the back of two previous weeks of competing.
With their dominant performance, they were then select to progress on to demonstrate their technical abilities, covering both syllabus work and a kata demonstration, both performed well on the day.
Mark
Mark was next up, in an initial pool of 2. A strong start saw him win his first round in just over 40 seconds. After a fairly long wait, he then went on to lose his next two rounds and finally drawing his final chance despite a couple of very close attempts to finish it early.
Results
The end results were, Mark unfortunately got nothing. Sebastian earned his Youth brown belt with 1 black tab, subject to some polish on his Kata. Luke achieved his senior 2nd Kyu (Blue belt). Congratulations to you all.
