Dealing with mixed levels

Managing a mixed group is not an easy undertaking

Recruiting members to take up judo is probably the biggest challenge any club coach faces. Handling a class of mixed level judokas is probably the second biggest challenge.

In some countries where judo is very popular, the big clubs there have so many members they can afford to have sessions dedicated just for beginners, sessions just for seniors, sessions just for competitors, sessions just for recreational players and so on. Some even have sessions just for women.

Most judo clubs, however, struggle just to get enough people on the mat to have a proper session. I've asked many judokas and coaches in many countries and the average number of bodies on the mat for a typical judo session is about 10 people. Sometimes there's eight, sometimes there's 12 but on average, if you can get 10 bodies on the mat, you're doing well.

Those 10 people will consist of black belts, brown belts, other colored belts and some white belts. In other words a real mixed bag of levels. How do you conduct a class that can cater to all these levels in a satisfactory way?

At KL Judo, we have classes three times per week: Tuesday, Friday and Sunday. Since our club consists mainly of working adults, the Sunday classes tend to be the biggest as that's when most people have a bit of free time for training.

Since the group is bigger on Sundays, we use those sessions to do more group-level activities. That means whatever is taught is done by everybody together. This necessarily means we do not focus on the grading syllabus as there are so many different levels on the mat. Instead we do more games, more practical drills and work on innovative and competition-style techniques.

Tuesdays and Fridays feature a much smaller group. The levels are still mixed but the number of people on the mat is much smaller. This allows us to give more personalized instruction to the players. Tuesdays and Fridays are opportunities for our players to master the techniques required for them to do grading.

This Friday (January 4, 2019) will be our fist class for the year. We have about a dozen players coming of which about a third are white belts. The others have some experience but are not very senior in terms of belt ranking.

In such a case, I plan to run the 2-hour class this way:
a) Animal warm ups led by Nigel.
b) Breakfalls and rolls for white belts (led by Nigel); Technical instruction for the rest (led by Oon)
c) Group tachi-waza (two basic standing techniques)
d) Group newaza (one basic turnover and four basic holds)
e) Randori