My daughter Valerie, who started a Judo club last month, is now addressing the one thing she had not yet tackled or thought of very deeply- rank promotions. Like many elite players, she is so oblivious to rank that periodically she’ll ask me, “What rank am I, dad?”  Now that she’s a coach and responsible for the development of her own students, rank takes on a whole new meaning, even though she couldn’t care less about her own rank.

Promotions have long been a sore subject for many of us. They are a tool that has been abused far too often to stifle the creativity of our outliers, and control and punish deserving judoplayers, while rewarding undeserving players to the point that advancing to high dan grades has almost become meaningless. None of this is good for our sport.

Do we if fact need belts and promotions in Judo? Wrestling doesn’t have any of this stuff, and it manages just fine. Norm Miller, who runs a club in Wisconsin, has no promotion system. His players can earn a “red, white and blue” paneled club belt by participating in ten tournaments, which I think is a cool idea, especially for kids. Other than that, everyone in his club wears a white belt and has no rank. His competitors wear white or blue belts when they enter tournaments. He seems to be doing OK. To each his own.

In spite of the politics and inequities of yudansha (black belt) ranks, mudansha (under black belt) promotions are a good educational tool to encourage, motivate, and set technical and performance goals for students, while being useful to coaches as an indicator of teaching effectiveness.

My daughter’s first decision was whether to use one of the national systems or create her own. Not surprisingly, it didn’t take long for her to decide that she would create one based on her own curriculum and standards. The apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree after all. In other words, she would resort to issuing those “terrible, worthless dojo promotions” that our national organizations hate because they lose out on a significant source of income.

While I think that the national standards are a good tool for coaches who don’t have the time, experience, or wherewithal to create their own, all coaches should sooner or later give serious thought to formulating their own curriculum and promotion standards. I believe professionalism requires this. It’s a benefit to coaches to be self-reliant, and responsible for creating, implementing, evaluating, and constantly improving their teaching methods, curriculum and promotion system. You can’t do this if you are blindly following someone else’s standards. When coaches create, implement and evaluate, their students benefit by having a promotion system that corresponds to the curriculum.

Some quickly point out that not having national standards will lead to abuse of rank. Well, we already have this with national standards, so what would be different? We all know who is over-ranked and under-ranked. Some coaches don’t care if their blue belts get beat by orange belts. Fortunately, more coaches do care. Tournament competition is a great evaluation tool that leads to self-correcting measures by coaches whose players are out in the open.

Promotions should not be viewed as a means to sell more belts or raise funds for clubs, coaches or national organizations as is prevalent in the taekwondo world. Increase membership fees if you need more funds to run your program. Don’t prostitute the promotion standards just for the sake of the mighty buck. On the other hand, use promotions for motivation and goal-setting purposes until your heart’s content.

My daughter and I have discussed many issues that coaches need to address. How hard do I make the tests? Should I formally test or should I use another method of evaluation? How many belts should I use? What skills do I require? Will my students’ ranks be recognized?…all great questions whose answers aren’t necessarily right or wrong, but whose answers certainly do have consequences, some good and some bad.

Emotionally, I’m in favor of walking into class and promoting a deserving but unsuspecting student. I was promoted to shodan like that. However, intellectually, I recognize the value of a formal and comprehensive test as a means to develop breadth and depth of knowledge, so I don’t pull surprises on my students, and I do test.

I’ve never worried about who will recognize my players’ ranks- my standards are high- but I do realize that it’s something that has petrified many coaches and some players. I had to deal with this problem early on in my career. I had earned an orange belt in a private club before transferring to a club that adhered to national standards. The secretary had told me when I enrolled that I would probably lose my orange belt since it wasn’t recognized by the federation. Needless to say, I wasn’t a happy camper. I was, however, allowed to be evaluated by the coach before losing my belt. Not only did he not demote me, but he promoted me to green belt within a month. He paid attention to my skills and not the provenance of my rank.

On average, most coaches I talk to seem willing to ignore whether a transferring player has official rank or dojo rank from some other club. They are more interested in whether that player can do Judo. Since skill levels vary so much even among clubs that adhere to national standards, most coaches are happy enough to evaluate transferring players and plug them into their system. The extremists, who are few, demote players or make them start all over as a white belt. Again, to each his own.

When it comes to what skills to require for each rank, we should distance ourselves from strict adherence to the go kyo no waza and nage no kata. I’m sure that in the past, these were well-thought pedagogical tools. Today, they no longer are. We can do better and we must do better. Must we start teaching techniques A, B and C, or could we consider starting with O, P and Q? Does it makes sense to require the same skills for every player within a certain rank given the principle of individuality? Or should we require x number of skills for each rank, allowing some latitude for individual characteristics and abilities?

Is it enough that our players can demonstrate techniques before they can be promoted? Or should we focus more on the performance behaviors we expect from players- behaviors which don’t necessarily have Japanese names attached to them. In other words should our teaching emphasize situation-based performance or technique-based knowledge?

The perfect curriculum and promotion system have yet to be devised. As much as I have modified my own teaching over the decades, I’m still not satisfied. I’m eager to see what my daughter comes up with. I hope that she’ll have some tremendous insight into what is for her a new subject. She might give me the last pieces of the puzzle, although deep down I know that teaching requires a never-ending search for answers, solutions, and improvement. Worst case scenario is that we’ll have some more deep conversations as we seek to provide our students with the best learning environment we can devise.