Dokan Karate Club

Dokan Karate continued their 2014 season with more victories at Penrith in the Chojinkai Open Style Karate Championship.

In another ridiculously busy tournament with many categories containing 50+ competitors Dokans students once again showed their class.

With just under 400 entries the tournament was the busiest it has ever been and 42 of Dokan's kids took part - which is a large squad by anyone’s standards.

In recent years the tournament has been dominated by the big Scottish fighting clubs although this year saw a large Welsh entry too. This is just what the Dokan squad needed; a hard tester as they prepare for the English Nationals and the World championships in three weeks time. And a hard test it was with some outstanding fighting and kata throughout the day, watched by around a 1000 spectators.

The club finished the day with 21 bronze medals, 21 silver medals and 12 gold medals. The tally may well have been higher had they not had to withdraw all their fighters aged 13 and older as it was 7.30 at night and their categories hadn’t even started.

As we had 42 students entered it is impossible to mention them all but I will say that I was not disappointed with any of my students throughout the day. They conducted themselves well, had good sporting spirit and gave everything the 100% effort that I ask of them.

It was great to see so many kids that don’t compete on a large scale attend this comp although the categories were far too wide, so for once a number of my students returned empty handed. This can’t be helped in a tournament of this size and I hope it doesn’t deter them from trying again.

I will mention some highlights of the day.

• Katie Snowdon and Maddison Taylor beat the Scots to an all Dokan final in 7 year old girl's kumite. Maddison also made the kata final.
• Ben Purvis was outstanding in getting the under nines boy kumite team to the final.
• Eleisha Mitchinson, Megan Purvis and Tammy Proctor were superb in the team kata winning gold.
• The under nines world championship kumite team were reffed into second place in their final but the spirit shown by Katie Hunnam, Lola Cassidy and Eve Palmer was second to none.
• Olivia Fellows pulled a gold in Kickmaster.
• The 12 years plus team kata was an all Dokan final with Alex , Rebecca and Becks pipping at the post Hooly , Hannah and Aidan.

Although the organiser Doug James has a wealth of experience surrounding karate competitions I could see from the start that this was going to run over and tried offering some advice such as doubling up on kata but he failed to see the severity of the situation and at one point in the morning four areas stood empty for over half an hour. The afternoon ran better but this was not a good PR exercise for Doug. My parents and kids were annoyed.

This is a shame because the standard was brilliant throughout the day.