For those of you who have been turned off from competing under the restrictive IJF rules, the National AAU Freestyle Judo Championships, which take place on March 23-24, 2012 in Kearney, Missouri, offers you a great opportunity to compete under more sensible rules that allow the full complement of Judo skills.
Winning on the Mat: Judo, Freestyle Judo and Submission Grappling is the title of Steve Scott’s massive (over 400 pages) book on Judo. Scott, a key leader in AAU and Freestyle Judo, is like me a rebel with a cause and admirer of Geof Gleeson. He feels that Judo gets no respect and is headed in the wrong direction. About a month ago, out of the blue, Scott was kind enough to send me a copy of his book. In return, he asked for nothing.
Slowly, but surely, more and more coaches are opting to run tournaments using non-IJF rules. Last weekend, I ran the second of my quarterly in-house tournaments using rules that I thought would bring about the best tournament experience for my players. I was not disappointed.
As I read the summaries of the recently held Sao Paulo World Cup and Brazil Grand Slam, I was taken aback, even though I shouldn’t be, by the relatively high number of matches during which only negative scores (penalties) were awarded, and positive scores were nowhere to be found. I think one match that ends with three penalties against two is already one too many. Unfortunately, there were other matches that wound up with the victor winning the battle of the penalties either 3-2 or 3-1 or 2-1. How exciting do you think those matches were? My daughter, Natalie, who competed at both events, said that there was a plethora of penalties, and she was bored out of her gourd watching the matches. Sounds about right.