At practice today, Victor Ortiz taught foot sweeps. I never saw a group of people pick it up so quickly. Of course they were mostly experienced players but none of them do footsweeps very much. I cannot for the life of me tell you what he did differently. They did them moving forward, backward - the standard drills.
It is driving me crazy. I asked my youngest daughter and she just shrugged and said he was fun. The only thing I can think of at all is that he emphasized doing it hard and that if you do it right they fall and if you do it wrong it hurts, both you and them. Also, since it was a smaller class today, he was able to correct every little mistake with each group. Of course, this is at the training center, so we had quite a bit of time and they worked on foot sweeps for an hour.
Still, having seen many many times when people were taught footsweeps and spent the entire practice looking as if they had multiple physical and mental disabilities as they kicked away at their partners with no discernible effect, today was noticeably different.
I don't know why everyone was doing so much better today but my plan is that we will go over this many more times.
Speaking of ashi waza, it is experiencing a bit of a resurgence. Two of the sessions at the National Coaches Conference in Las Vegas in January will be on ashi waza. Bill Montgomery will be doing ashi waza drills and Hayward Nishioka will be doing a session on teaching ashi waza. I asked Hayward to bring copies of his book, Ashi Waza, to autograph. I am pretty sure this is the first book Hayward ever wrote.
Norm Miller (the AAU Judo chair) makes fun of me for all the Japanese terms I use but the name of the book IS "Ashi waza". So There.
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