Las Cruces

Last weekend I had the opportunity to go to Las Cruces and help out at a tournament. I’ve been to a few so this wasn’t that big I thing, I thought. However, it turns out that I was running a scoreboard, brackets, and helping others learn how to keep both match time and osaekomi time! This I had never done before.

Thankfully I paid attention when I went to Denver for their tournament and discovered how simple the quarter, dime, nickel, penny method of bracketing was. I used that and ran through all of the divisions pretty seamlessly. The matches went well with only one disqualification, which was because one individual though it would be good to taunt his competitor.

I also had the opportunity to work with a very diligent student from the NMSU Judo Club. I’ve worked with her and chatted with her a number of times and have been consistently impressed with her willingness and dedication to learn judo no matter who is teaching it.

We worked on Sunday for about an hour and a half on a variety of topics. Thanks to AnnMarie DeMars, Gerald Lafon, Paul Nogaki, and others for teaching me that a clinic should be limited to only a handful or less of topics. We started working with some basic conditioning drills and exercises that she can do solo. After that we talked about Tai Otoshi, a turnover, and an armlock from guard. It was a very fast hour and a half and I believe she came out of the session with a fair amount of information that she can use!

I have to say, all in all, it was a good weekend! Many thanks to Oscar, Toby, Nadia, and Ashley for letting me bend your ears a little bit and help out where I can!