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ARTICLES AND COMMENTARY    

TOURNAMENT PREPARATION

   More and more, it becomes harder to prepare for a tournament. To create the proper atmosphere, you have to involve all the students, or make a lesser light group out of the non-tournament participants. Even when you do your best to separate the two groups, the energy and intensity is noticeably different. It makes the non-participants feel like pacifist or quakers. I have tried every angle and my final approach is, to involve everyone in the training. I just excuse the ones from the tournament who can't go, or do not wish to. When we prepare for competition, we prepare to win. It is not an all or nothing preparation, but it is with purpose. First let me define winning the way I define it for my students. Winning consist of doing your best in training, as well as in the ring. If you lose, it had better not be because you did not train well enough to win. There is no excuse for not being physically and mentally prepared before you step in the ring. You have to be willing to give yourself every opportunity to win with your preparation. This is where the team concept comes into play. All must take the responsibility of pushing themselves as well as each other. You must train hard enough to give your fellow students the opportunity to match with someone very competitive during training. It is also a safety factor. People often get injured or injure someone else, when they are out of shape, or their timing is off. Only consistent hard training can avoid fatigue and ring rust. I also must have a chance to train them mentally and emotionally. Half the training is from the neck up, as well as the neck down. I tell my students that, if they will listen to me and do what I say, they will win. Remember that winning is a max effort during training and in the ring. I ask them to commit ot giving their opponents "two minutes of hell." If they then do not win, they sure as heck didn't lose either. Either they fought a superior opponent, got a bad call, it wasn't their day, or the time ran out before they won. I approach the tournament as recess. We take time off regular training and go out to play. But that doesn't mean that we don't play hard or play to win. We also try to emphasize team unity and identity by wearing red gi tops, with red logo tee shirts underneath. We have some chants and cadence, to increase moral and pride. We emphasize spirit and courtesy. If a student steps out of line, he is gone. Not only from the tournament, but from the school. Discipline is the heart, of pride and moral. Tournaments are not much for realism. I would hate to see any student try and defend themselves with just tournament techniques. Granted that some of the kicks, strikes, ect. could bring down an opponent, but you would have to get lucky, or someone would have to be dumb enough to fight you that way. I also don't think a student should get in the habit of pulling their punches, or expect someone to step between them and their attacker saying, "I believe you just scored a point on your attacker".

   Tournament fighting does somewhat duplicate the stress and pressure of a real fight. But, only in the sense that you are fighting someone you don't know who is going to try to whack you a bit. The true realism of a "real" street fight ends there. Helping your student prepare for the tournament is two-fold. First comes the determination of what type of fighter they are. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. You have to help them discover what they are, and how best to use them to an advantage. Are they punchers, kickers, fast, slow, quick hands, slow feet, the other or neither. Then you develop their style of strategy. You take their best two techniques and build a good defense. For some, the strategy is; play winning defense and score a point. For others, you have them run right through their opponent. Everyone can't fight good. . . . But everyone can fight "good and hard". !!!! This you emphasize and you make it a mantra. If your student is having an off day, they can over come it by fighting hard and with aggressive resolve. They may get out-pointed, but I want their opponent to remember them and be worse for the ware. It is no sin to be out pointed, but it is a sin to be out fought. If your opponent is better, you have nothing to loose by getting in their face and staying there. There are plenty of good point fighters that are just so much puddin in the dojo. By the same token there are some dojo fighters that couldn't win forth place in a four-man point fight. Obviously everyone is shooting to be good at both. I try to help my students identify which one they are and give them a place to grow. I think more than anything, the students need to know how a tournament fits in to the grand scheme of things. Tournament wins and losses get into a students head if you are not careful. They begin to judge themselves by this brief test of their skills. Tournament training and participation is notorious for running students off. After the hype and focus of the tournament, students sometimes feel burned out or bored with the day-to-day training. A bad tournament experience can sour a student or their parents. It can also create primma donna's due to trophy's and accolades. Fortunately with the vast amount of cross training being done now, every student has an assortment of martial arts interest and identities to hang their hats on. Before cross training, if a student was poor at point fighting and kata, they were pretty much out of options. With the other disciplines available, you can develop a well-rounded martial artist that isn't paralyzed by one or two dimensions of martial arts activity. This is the carrot I use to keep everyone challenged as to what happens when we get back from the tournament. I also go back to basics and fundamentals for a couple of weeks after. This is for two reasons. First; it gets everyone re-introduced to the important aspects of improvement and practice. Second; we put on a new member push the week after tournaments, so all students, new and old, are doing the same thing. I predict that sooner or later, point tournaments, except for kids, will be a thing of the past. Pancration or something of that nature will make just kumite points obsolete. This will bring about a whole new culture of students and instructors. But back to the subject at hand, I run practice for about five weeks. Our dojo uses heavy to hard contact as a general rule, so there has to be a little scaling back of the contact. There has to be time to install the point defense and the point techniques. Defense takes the longest, as our dojo approach is up close and personal. Every match is point driven. At first it is one point and you are out. It is frustrating but it does make you more defensive minded. This takes up the first two weeks of training. The next two weeks, we build to two, then three, then sometimes four points for special drills. Kata work is thrown in for conditioning and mental discipline. The drill is to keep your concentration when extremely fatigued, and kata is perfect for that. We run kata full out for two minutes. Then slow for two. That is the interval part. There is also a step down drill, running the kata for 4, 3, 2, 1 minutes with one minute rest between. We have a three night mandatory training week. You miss, you make it up, or you are dropped from training. Week three is devoted to lots of matching and refining the tournament kata. Week four and part of five, is for situational training of the various ring occurrences; going out of bounds, watching what the judges are calling, being behind, being ahead, being injured, bad judges, scouting your opponent, keeping your concentration, controlling the tempo, reading your opponents defense, gamesmanship and sportsmanship. We also do Kata scoring with everyone being a judge. The last half-week we have an in-school shiai, and spirit rally on the Thursday night before the tournament. During the training, I won't let my blackbelts fight down (fight kyu ranks). It messes up their timing and can de-motivate the kyu's. Yours truly and Dan Dye kumite with the kyu's, so we are both physically happy to see tournament training end. If I have a physically gifted kyu who has a good chance at winning his division, I let him or her fight up (blackbelts) at the end of training. I make sure they know what it is for.

   All in all, tournaments are a lot of work. The end of training is just the beginning. Getting everyone there and keeping up with them is a real job. Judging of coarse is like another job; and a thankless one at that. Handled right tournaments can be an enriching experience. You make some life long friends, and discover that your skills are better than you suspected. My hat is off to the tournament directors and host. Holding a tournament is one thing I never want to do. These people work their tails off, and it has to be a labor of love for them to do it. There is no guarantee that they won't loose their butts financially while they are working them off. We only go to two or three a year, so we try to make the most of it, by going to good ones. My blackbelts vote on the tournaments, so it is their decision. Otherwise, we make sure we leave some time and money for seminars and shiai's. Our philosophy is; if you are going to go to a tournament go hard. Take your "A" team and your "A" game. Be modest in victory and tolerant in defeat, but go for the gusto. Americans love to win and play on a winning team. Don't call it competition and then play it down as just having fun. You can't have it both ways, and your students don't understand the point to it. Train hard!!. . . Fight hard!!!. . . Do your best!!!. . . . . . That's what a "winner" does.

    Shihan Denny Shaffer
Ku-Dan