South Yorkshire Open 2012 (August 19th)
For the fourth year running, Wado Uk sent a squad off to this competition. The day ended with our group winning 1 Gold Medal, 1 Silver Medal, and 5 Bronze Medals.
Those taking part from the East Hull Karate club were;
Amrit, Charan and Teerth Dhesi, Oliver Dearing, Charlotte Pinder, Owen and Tonya Storr, Loretta Wendt, Joe Munro, Chris Fenton and Barry Meanwell.
From the Shinken Dojo were;
Amie Newton, Ellie Hayes, and Matthew March.
From the Hull Zanshin Dojo;
Ellis Miller, Josh Beaumont and Josh Hartery.
From the Kingswood Karate Club;
Hayden and Brandon Greenwood.
In the Kata events we were to win three of our eight medals. The best of which was to go to Brandon Greenwood of the newly formed Kingswood Karate Club. Brandon has been performing well recently, and managed to add our only Gold medal of the day to his personal collection.
Bronze medals were to be the order of the day for Ellie Hayes and Amrit Dhesi, following their performances on the tatami. Ellie is another one of our competitors who is showing a real maturity in her development, and will hopefully bring more medals our way in the future. Amrit too is is a promising prospect, as he has been winning medals for some time now and is still only 6 years old.
The remaining five medals would be in the Kumite divisions. the best of which was a silver won by Barry Meanwell in his +75kg senior men's category. One medal never being enough for Barry, he was to add a Bronze for his efforts in his open weight men's section. Another double medal winning performance for Barry, meaning we had two more medal wins on the day.
One of these would be another Bronze, and go to Charlotte Pinder for her Kumite performances. Charlotte is a regular medal winner in both Kata and Kumite, but today would see no reward for her efforts in Kata. However all was not lost, as Charlotte got down to work in her girls Kumite matches and performed well enough to secure this medal. Fingers crossed she is soon back on track in Kata too.
The final medal of the day was to be our final Bronze. This time it was the boys team of Oliver Dearing, Teerth Dhesi and Josh Hartery who were to be in good form. Oliver and Teerth being the more experienced of the trio, they set off in positions 1 & 2 with Josh being used at position 3 when necessary. Overall their performances were good enough to see them into the semi finals, where unfortunately they met their match. However this was enough to see the boys get the Bronze medal which they thoroughly deserved.
We would like to thank all our traveling supporters for being at the event, and encouraging our youngsters along the way. Many of these supporters and younger competitors stayed back to offer support to our senior competitors, and this support was really appreciated.
Thanks also go to Paul Braid, Barry Meanwell and Chris Greenwood for their assistance with coaching duties. Sukoshi Ryu the tournament organiser's would also like to thank Allison Munro and Gaynor Dent, for helping with table official duties at the event.