All the people who matter

I was reading Steve Scott's blog today and he mentioned Ken Regennitter. He's a person I don't remember and I misspent a good deal of my youth not far from Kansas City. I gather he is one of the people who taught Steve growing up and now Steve has taught judo, jiu-jitsu, sambo and wrestling for over 40 years. He's had over a dozen of his players go out and start their own judo clubs.

It reminded me of my own first judo instructor, Bill Shelton, who I haven't seen in over thirty years, since he graduated from college, married and moved away to teach physical education in Iowa, I think.

As I read Steve's post, of course he mentioned a lot of other people who crossed his path, like Maurice Allan and John Saylor, who were international competitors and coaches. I remember asking both Jim Pedro, Sr. who grew up in Boston and Olympic silver medalist Lynn Roethke, from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the names of the people who had started them in judo, and, years apart, both of them gave me the same answer word for word,

"You wouldn't know him."

It amused me one day to hear someone bragging about his position in a judo organization, proudly announcing,

"People know me, even if they know I'm an asshole. Do you know how many people know my name now? I matter!"


Two things struck me, this morning, as I was browsing the Internet and reading judo books when I really should be finishing up on my last conference paper ...

1. We never would have been in the position to meet those people you've heard about if not for the people whose names you wouldn't recognize. This is as true for millions of people as it is for me, Steve, Lynn and Jim, and just as true of Chemistry, mathematics, poetry and computer science as it is of judo. [That isn't always the case, though. I was asking Sensei Richard (Blinky) Elizalde this morning who was his first judo teacher and he answered, 'Hayward Nishioka, when I was a little kid, back in 1962.]
2. I suspect my first judo coach quit teaching judo, had a few kids and never thought about me again. He was also Tim Schultheis's first coach, now from Gurnee Judo who you can hear coaching his son in this video. The people who set our lives on a different, and better, path, often, without even knowing it - these are the people who matter.

Coaching Your Own Kid: The Questions to Ask Again and Again

I've always questioned the assumption that all parents of children who are active in sports are some kind of deranged "Little League parent" living vicariously through their children. Of course, there are some of those, but there are a great many more I've seen who are trying to figure out the best for their child, day after day.

What makes it even harder is that the answers to the questions change, so you have to ask yourself some of the same questions over and over again.

Let me give just one example:

Do I really have what it takes to coach my child? When your child is a beginner, if you know the basics of your sport, have patience, can get to practice once or twice a week and enjoy working with children, the answer is probably yes.

Now your child is a 14-year-old who wants to win the junior nationals. Can you make it to practice four or five times a week? Can you get to the tournaments several weekends a year? Can you help your child analyze her strengths and weaknesses beyond the basics? Is your own knowledge of the sport at an advanced level? Can you teach your child to win with grace and lose with dignity? No one is perfect but if you are pretty good on all of those dimensions, you'll probably be fine.


Now your child has a shot at the Olympics. All of the sacrifices your child has made, the hard work - and your sacrifices and work, too, have paid off. Can you make it to practice every day? Do you have other coaches, including strength coaches, technical experts, to help in areas where you aren't the best coach? How are you at video analysis? Setting up a training schedule that accounts for the season, pre-season and post-season? Can you take the time away from your other children, your job? Are you one of the best coaches in the country in your sport?

and those are just the questions you need to ask over and over of yourself, about one decision. We haven't even mentioned the questions you need to ask about your child yet.

This parenting stuff is hard.

I remember one day driving to practice and Ronda was at that age where she was always arguing with me about training, judo, partners and the universe. I finally turned to her and yelled,

"I'm doing the best I can! There's not a book for this, you know!"

Maybe there should be.

Old Grandmas, Middle School Kids and ###ing Morons (not really related)

First class at Gompers Middle School was on Friday and what an awesome bunch of kids! At the end of the class they were clamoring to stay later, try randori and have practice three days a week instead of one. They also wanted to know when they would be ready to enter a tournament. They were far more attentive and appreciative than any group I have taught anywhere. Of course, this is a very large school and the first 16 kids to sign up got into the class so they were pretty motivated to be there, I guess. It was such a nice experience.  One of my former club members had sent bottles of water and power bars for the kids to have during and after practice and they must have thanked me five times each for coming, for a bottle of water, for a power bar and then a couple times more for teaching them judo.

I know with the latest movie out, Waiting for Superman, it's become even more popular to bash public schools. All I can say is that every person I have met at Gompers (which is about 16 kids, one teacher, one counselor and the principal) has been incredibly top notch and motivated. These folks are working their hardest in a very resource poor environment. When my husband was talking about how much the public schools needed last night, I said,
"Well, I went and taught a class at one of those schools today. What exactly did you do to help?"

He did not have an answer. It was worth teaching for that alone!

Next week is Ronda's turn to teach. They are really looking forward to it. Partly because of all of the embarrassing stories about her that I told them. She'll be as red as the mats!

[Oh, yeah, speaking of Ronda, Gary Butts told me to mention that she is available to do clinics. Someone mentioned flying in a clinician from thousands of miles away and when he asked why they didn't just ask Ronda,who lived much closer to them, the person said he didn't know she was available. So, yes, just post a note to her on Facebook, which seems to be where all of the young people practically live.]

Speaking of Gompers and young people, I was teaching and I said,
"I know all of you kids can do this. I used to say that I can do it and I am as old as your mother but then a student about your age very politely informed me one day that I was as old as his grandmother."

One of the students helpfully called out,
"My grandma is 49."

Of course, I am OLDER than his grandma.

Speaking of grandmas - I was out riding a bike today, from Santa Monica up to Malibu, which I do fairly often, now that I had my knee replaced. A few blocks from home, the 15th idiot of  the day walked out in front of me on the bike path (apparently, no one believes those NO PEDESTRIAN signs apply to them). Usually I can swerve around them but this particular idiot as I swerved to the left decided to keep walking. This left me two choices

1. Slam into her going 15 miles an hour on a  bike
2. Slam on the brakes and wipe out on the bike path

I did the latter. She apologized about 1,000 times, which made me feel SLIGHTLY less like slapping her. As I told me husband, my cuts and bruises will heal shortly and she'll probably always be stupid.

So, today, I walked a mile, biked about 16 miles and crashed on the pavement. Thanks to judo reflexes after 139,567 breakfalls, I picked myself up off the concrete with nothing but a bruised hand from jamming the breaks and a scraped elbow, and went on my merry way. This was after having taught judo yesterday.

It occurred to me that I am the exact age my grandmother was when I used to spend the night at her house. It was a big treat, spending the night at Grandma's house. My grandmother had the typical Catholic family back in the day - a Volkswagen family: a new baby every year and they all looked alike. So, there were a boatload of grandkids and every weekend one of them would stay overnight. My grandmother was about 40 pounds overweight, wore house dresses and panty hose. The most exercise she ever got was cooking lunch and dinner and then watching game shows on TV. I was very happy to visit. She had an attic to explore, a tire swing out back and a bunch of books. There was also an ice cream shop across the street where I could run over and get an ice cream cone.

The thought of my grandmother doing judo, riding a bike to another city or wiping out on the pavement would have struck me as insane. I am sure my grandma would have agreed with me.

So, what has changed? Is it all of those years of judo that kept me in shape?
Is it our society's view of aging?

What do you think?

For now, I am going to turn in because I scored a ticket to the TED talk in Santa Barbara tomorrow - which is yet another thing I can't see my grandmother doing.

An Honest Answer to How to Improve U.S. Judo

My answer to the question, "How can we improve the international competitiveness of U.S. judo?" is given in my latest attempt at a podcast.

"What is wrong with judo in the U.S. and what needs to be done about it?"

This is part one of however many I find time to do. In short, I think we need to start with an honest assessment, from top to bottom, of what our weaknesses are, and then we need to address those through major changes in our training and coaching. But hey, I took the time to record this, so you may as well listen to it.

In fact, I recorded it twice, because it was hard to hear the first time and I did it louder the second time. The amusing fact is, I am a small person with a soft voice. People just claim I am yelling at them because they don't want to hear what I have to say.

Back to Judo (It's All Will's Fault)

I received this email from Dr. Will Dampier today

I noticed you haven't posted to your judo blog in a while ... although I do enjoy your programming/stats blog as well.

If you're looking for an idea I have one for ya:

I remember you posted a while about teaching foot-sweep and remarking that nobody ever kicks hard enough ... especially for beginners.  I thought about the problem and came up with a fun idea.  I had all of the students bring in a pair of large bath towels which we wrapped around are ankles/shins.  Then we did all of the common foot-sweep drills but concentrated on kicking hard.

The last time we did this I had a few brand-new students who had no preconceptions about how foot-sweeps are "supposed" to work.  After only a few practices they've become some of the best ashi-waza players in the class.

You can see a video of it here: http://animoto.com/play/P0fz7RqsqUfsoneTQ1Ao1Q

So, now that I am back to posting and back to judo, you can all blame Will!

Actually, I have been extremely busy at my real job. Today was the second of two national conference calls on the Ticket to Work evaluation for social security. If you live in California, and get a survey in the mail - send it back!

I just finished the FIFTH paper for the Western Users of SAS Software conference. In case you are interested, they are on super-computing, data visualization, programming and functions, procedures and graphics application. Okay, I knew you weren't interested, who am I kidding. Fine! Then I won't tell you about the paper for the other conference on evaluation of ethics. Some of these judo people made for great case studies. Really, I'm kidding about that part - so far anyway, but I may work some examples in there.

SO-O-O  all that being done for now I have a chance to get back to judo. Remember that program that Ronda started up at Gompers Middle School? Well, it's starting up again on Friday, with me teaching the first session. She and I are going to trade off teaching, since both of us have pretty limited time. Urban schools face a lot of challenges and a lack of resources. It's been an education so far working with the teacher and principal to see how they overcome everything from (literal) fires at the school to (very real) concerns about the kids' safety walking home. I'm looking forward to this school year. I've been turned off by the true motivations of a lot of people in judo who want to work in the public schools. Despite the lip service you get, most of them just want more money in membership fees in their organizations or to run 100,000 kids through the mill so they can come up with a dozen who might have shots at an Olympic medal.

Christopher Jencks, who wrote the book Inequality, ended it with the statement that the reason he was for having playgrounds for eight-year-olds wasn't that it increased the probability of them earning a higher income as adults. It was because it increased the probability of them having a good time when they were eight. So, yeah, it's like that. These kids face an uphill climb in their lives and if they can be just a tiny bit healthier and happier because they have judo class on Friday afternoons, then we're down.

Whenever I say things like that, Jim Pedro, Sr. rolls his eyes and groans,
"There you go, being a yuppie liberal again!"

By the way, thanks a lot to the person from my old judo club who sent the bottles of water and power bars. As Ronda noted, these kids seem to overdose on the junk food, and there is no water fountain close to the practice room, so it was very appreciated. You can join my Yuppie Liberal Club.

Maximum Efficiency Drills: Ideas I stole from Steve Scott & Other people

My friend Steve Scott, of Welcome Mat Judo  has written several books, so I can't be expected to memorize all of them. My favorite is his book Coaching on the Mat, and I _think_ this idea was in that book. Or, it might have been from one of those times we were eating at that Italian restaurant in Kansas City and drinking beer. Whatever. It's still a good idea and Coaching on the Mat is still a good book.

Oh, my point, yeah, that. Steve had two, related ideas, actually.

1. We don't have a lot of partners in the U.S. to hone our skills through randori and good drill training can help overcome that disadvantage. If we did, we would regularly get in trouble in a variety of situations and figure out how to get out of them. We would have that guy who always gets us with seoi nage and have to figure out how to block that. We'd have the woman who always does sankaku and we'd learn to see it coming. And so on for 50 different scenarios. But we DON'T have that so instead we need to use drills to create those situations. We need to have a drill for counters and have our partner come in to a seoi nage and repeatedly practice countering that. We need another drill to practice stopping sankaku before we get stuck. And so on. This requires our coaches and players to be more analytical about their judo, to look at what all the different angles are from which we could get caught and how to defeat each one of them. From the other perspective, we also have to use drills to simulate the situations in which we intend to practice our own techniques. Certainly, Steve didn't invent this idea. Back in the day, Jimmy Martin, Steve Seck, Richard (Blinky) Elizalde and the rest of the old Tenri Dojo crowd did the exact same thing. "Hey, step forward like this with your left foot." "Get a high grip on my and go into o uchi gari" . However, since there have been a LOT of years since this days, I think Steve Scott has been thinking about this a lot, developing a wide variety of drills and I think he articulated it better than we did. His main point was that a really good coach will have considered a huge number of possible situations on the mat and had his or her athletes drill extensively for those long before they get caught in that situation in a tournament. As Jim Hrbek once said, "There are no stupid champions."  (There are some pretty f^^^ing annoying champions, but that's a different subject.)
2. Since we don't have a lot of time in the U.S. to practice judo, compared to the opportunities available in many other countries, we need to maximize the payoff from the time we do have. Every drill we do should hit at least two or three out of four purposes. These are to improve our judo technical skills, to improve conditioning, to build competitive spirit and to have fun. So, you might do a drill where players do as many of a matwork combination as they can in one minute. Then, they stand up and do one minute of combination drills, again, as many as they can in a minute. They repeat this three times without a break, each time using a different mat technique or combination. Now you have players who have worked for six minutes straight (conditioning), worked on six different techniques (technical skill) and tried to do as many as they could to beat the other people in the room (competitive spirit). Also, notice in this drill that the smallest person in the room can win by being fastest, so it pushes that bigger kid who would always win in randori. It also gives that smallest kid more of an incentive to push him or herself knowing that this is a chance to beat that bigger kid. 

I've actually thought about his ideas (and those of other people) on drill training a lot lately but haven't had a chance to write things down .  The way business has been, I have barely had time to breathe, much less get to practice as often as I would like or run down and watch people compete. (By the way,  congrats to Crystal and Erin on first place today. As for the rest of you people, would it be TOO MUCH TO ASK for you to send me a text message telling me how you did while I am stuck here slaving over a hot computer all day, huh?)

Let Your Child be a Flying Trapeze Zombie

One of the most common questions I get from coaches is how to deal with parents who want to live vicariously through their children.

I have found this problem to be bigger in degree than quantity. What I mean is that far more often parents have a better idea of the interests and abilities of a child than the coach does. Generally, parents bring their child to judo, or any other sport, to make friends, get a healthy amount of exercise and/or because they think they're taking karate because it's all the same.

MOST parents don't have Olympic dreams for their children, and in most cases they are right. They are more interested in sending their children to a good college so they can eventually move them the hell out of the house and quit depending on the Bank of Mom & Dad. More often it is the COACH who wants to invest huge amounts of (the parents') time and money into a child who may have talent but not the motivation. This isn't such a problem, because the parents can just refuse to go along.

When it is the parent, though, who wants it more than Johnny or Susie, who is trying to live vicariously through their children - I have never been able to get through to those parents.

Let me tell you, though --- talent without motivation is a road to nowhere.

I understand the difficulty of having a child with talent without the interest. Accept it. Your child is not you. That's a period at the end of that sentence.

Sometimes I watch Julia at judo practice and I think what a shame it is she doesn't have a passion for it. She doesn't mind judo. She hops in the car most weekends, especially when she knows Ronda is teaching (Ronda is funner, I have been told). Sometimes I watch her pull off a technique and think it's REALLY too bad this is not what she wants to do. But it isn't.

In addition to judo, Julia plays on her school basketball, soccer and volleyball teams. She is on the student council, plays saxophone and just started drum lessons. Watching her at her lesson, I was quite surprised at how well she could read music.

She took a lesson at the trapeze school on the pier and loved it. So, she did two weeks of trapeze camp. Last week she was in a show as a zombie on the flying trapeze.

Parents often come up with explanations to justify what THEY want. Judo will teach their child discipline, to overcome fears, to stick with something they started, make them friends they will have for life, give them skills they will have when they are old. I believe all of those things are true. BECAUSE Julia has been on judo, she has had a leg up on every sport she has ever started. When she wanted to learn the trapeze, she wasn't afraid to fall and she was physically strong, thanks to judo.

However, music also teaches discipline and sticking with something you started and she has stuck with that for years. She's been on the student council for three years (not bad considering she is twelve). Doing a back flip in the air 30 feet above the ground probably takes overcoming some fears.

As a parent, I believe it is your responsibility to help your child grow into a good person. It is, however, neither your responsibility nor your right to force your child to grow into the person that YOU wanted to be nor the you want him or her to be.

So, I say if your child wants to be a trapeze zombie, or dress up like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and fly through the air to be caught by Captain America, let them.