Tournament

For the record, the tournament went pretty well... I lost my first "Individuals" match to a vastly inferior opponent due to my lack of mobility. We showed up a little late so I didn't get enough time to properly warm up, but even so I'm still a bit slow on my feet and I tend to wait for my opponent too much. The sad thing is that this guy was slow... predictable, lumbering, clumsy... if you push an opponent out of the ring (legally), they get a penalty, and two penalties result in a point (so if I managed to check him out of the ring twice, I get a point). The match started with him getting an ugly point on me, but I immediately saw a pattern... he would swing for my head and then lumber slowly past me, I'd turn and watch him go by, and the second he turned I'd do a slow, easily blocked swing to his head and then body-check him out of the ring. I managed to knock him out 3 times but on the way to the 4th he managed to hit me with a sloppy, sloppy hit that the judges awarded him and I lost. It was ugly Kendo, but I learned a lot from it.

Next we had "Teams" matches... We won our first two rounds 4-1 (against Battle Creek... I think in Michigan) and 4-0-1 (against a club from DC)... I lost my first Team match 1-0 by again doing too much waiting... but I managed to get a few clean hits and started to "get" how to move properly, not tire myself out and to goad my opponent into making an opening. I tied my second match against a 4th degree black belt (!!)... I got a beautiful nuki-men point, which she managed to get back on a quick little hit to my "do". It wasn't a clean hit, but she was much smaller than me and the judges tend to go easier on smaller opponents.

My first tournament point! Go me!

Anyway, we ended up tied 1-1, so also my first tournament tie (and my first tournament not-loss!). Sadly, our third match was against an extremely strong team from Toronto (the Japanese-Canadian Cultural Club... JCCC) which we lost 0-4-1... I lost my match, but my opponent was much, much better than me (faster, more experienced, stronger) so I feel no shame at that. Overall I'm very happy with the results. Many of my fellow kendo-ka didn't earn their first tournament point for 3 or 4 tournaments (Jeff Yu didn't get his first point until his 6th tournament), and I earned my first point on my 2nd! Go me!

Now I just have to work on getting my first tournament win... there are tournaments in Toronto and Waterloo over the summer, so I'm hoping to do even better at them!