AAU Regional Championships

It really is a shame that the AAU is becoming less and less popular.  I feel that the competition there, or more specifically the type of competition (i.e., the scoring system) is far more superior than that used by the USANKF/WKF.  The AAU standard scoring system is shobu sanbon, incorporating both waza-ari and ippon.  At the national level, though, they introduce a shobu-ippon division (my personal favorite) and a WKF style division.  I'm all for good competitive spirit and all, but you can't convince me that making different techniques worth different points still preserves the budo attitude.  All it does, in my opinion, is encourage flashiness and ineffective technique.  Many critics of the shobu-ippon system say that the competition is boring because the variety of techniques used is smaller, and to a certain degree I agree, but if you watch the top fighters in the WKF, they all use the same techniques that are typically used in shobu-ippon competitions - gyaku-tsuki, kizami-zuki, mae-geri, mawashi-geri amd ashi-barai.

Regardless of the scoring, the tournament yesterday was on a smaller scale than most NKF based competitions.  Even with that in mind, the competition was fierce.  The fighters present for my division are guys that are at the top of any competition that they fight in.  These are the guys that don't care about rule sets, but make their karate work for them.  These are fighters that are very close to having similar attitudes to the likes of Frank Brennan, a fighter vastly successful in both traditional JKA shobu-ippon as well as in mixed-style tournaments.

I ended up doing fairly well, 2nd in kata, and 3rd in kumite.  The 2nd place in kata was largely due to my ankle rolling in the second jump in Kanku-sho...this hurt my pride more than the ankle which did hurt like a mother...my opponent was only doing Jion...no reason he should have beat me.  Oh well, kumite was great.  I felt like I was  moving more and being far more aggressive than usual.  Sensei says that I was still holding back, he said that he thought I was the better fighter and should have one but I was hesitant at the wrong times.  Well, improvement is improvement I say.

The semester is finally winding down, and that means more time available for real training.  And reall training is definitely in order...it doesn't look like I'm making it out to California for the Riverside tournament, but Euro-Cup is around the corner at the end of October.  Time to have some fun with training!

Wish me luck!