Belts Part 1: High standards

New yellow belts

Many of our players came to us as white belts. In other words, absolute beginners. But a few have come to us from other clubs where they had already obtained their colored belts.

In almost every single case of those coming to us with colored belts, the level of judo technical knowledge and grasp of Japanese terminology (which is the language of judo), is shockingly low.

This is true even of colored belts who came to us from overseas. After experiencing this over and over again, it really made me wonder what it is they actually learned when they got their yellow or orange or green belts, etc...

When I created the syllabus for our belt grading system, I set a pretty high standard because I want our yellow belts to be capable judokas. If someone has a yellow belt from our club, they must have sound technical knowledge and are capable of sparring.

Last year, one of our players asked me why our yellow belt grading is so hard. He said other clubs have a much simpler syllabus for yellow belt. I replied, "We are not other clubs."

On occasions I have wondered whether it might be better to dumb-down our syllabus. We could easily do so and still be far more advanced than other clubs. But looking at what our recent crop of new yellow belt holders are capable of doing, I know we are on the right track.

Will I tweak the syllabus from time to time? Probably. These things are not set in stone and you have to make adjustments along the way. But will I dumb down the syllabus? Probably not and certainly not in a significant way.

Given the good results we got from our players taking on our syllabus, I'm inclined to keep the syllabus tough and our standards high.