You train with the teammates you have...

There are two basic types of judo players. One type is very particular about who's coming for training. They want to know that the "right" type of players are there, which could mean players who are of the same gender or roughly the same weight or posses a certain skill level and so on. If they get the sense that the people attending are not the "right" type, they give the training a miss.

Another type just wants to do judo so they don't care who is attending or not. As long as there is another body on the mat, they will come for training, even if it's just one other person. It's not that they don't prefer the "right" type (i.e. same gender, same weight, of a certain skill level). Who wouldn't prefer to have ideal training partners? It's just that their philosophy is some training is better than none at all.

Usually the successful players are the ones who belong to the second category. They will come for training regardless of whoever is there (or not).

When I think of this topic, I'm always reminded of something former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

This can easily be paraphrased to fit a judo context. "You train with the teammates you have on the mat, not the teammates you might want or wish to have on the mat at a later time."

This applies not just to players on the mat but the mat itself. Ideally you would want a dojo with a big mat area but sometimes that is not available to you. So what do you do? You train on the mat you have, not the mat you might want to have or wish to have at a later time.

In short, you make do with what you have. This applies to life too. You might wish to drive a BMW to work but if all you have is a MyVi, do you avoid driving to work? You might like to have some French cuisine but if the only food outlet open at the time is a hawker stall, do you starve instead?

When I was a student in the university, there weren't many judo players around. The university judo club training was just twice a week and that wasn't enough for me. So, I used to recruit people to spar with me. I would ask dorm mates, classmates, Aikido people, Karate people, football players... anybody who was willing to don a judogi and spar with me. I didn't care if they were big or small, male or female. As long as I could get some training done, I was happy.

Some time back, a Korean student visited Malaysia and did some training with me. He too was educated in the US and he told me about his experiences doing judo there, which were remarkably similar to mine. There weren't many judo players at his university so he would buy extra judogis and loan them to friends whom he would convince to spar with him.

Travis Stevens is an Olympic silver medalist but being based in the US, he didn't have many training partners. He told me that at one point in his career, he had absolutely no one to train with so he hired a white belt to train with him daily. He literally paid the white belt to be on call to do whatever drills he wanted to do for the day. If he had only trained whenever there were world-class black belts his size on the mat, he wouldn't have that Olympic silver medal today.

Judo is not a popular sport like badminton. You can always find people to play badminton with. But it's not easy to find judo training partners. If there's someone else willing to be on the mat to train, you'd do well to join them there.

Remember: "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time."