I don’t know what it is about Judo, but we have allowed our sport to be defined and mislabeled without much of a fight. We are partly responsible for the way we are perceived by the general public. Our actions, and more importantly our inactions, have the public believing we are something we aren’t or shouldn’t be. Case in point: we are a cheap sport.
Don’t freak out. I haven’t lost all my marbles yet. Rest assured that I don’t hate Judo. I still love it. On the other hand, two of my daughters have at one time or another told me that they hate Judo. Of course, there’s a story behind my daughters’ statements, which is well worth analyzing because I also hear “I hate Judo” from other judoplayers.
A few days ago, I stumbled across a review of a coaching conference, at which I was one of the technical, on-the-mat clinicians. The author gave a fair assessment of the five presentations that were offered. I thought his comments on my presentation were positive, except that I was labelled one of the most ‘controversial’ figures in U.S. Judo, and that some of my ideas were “outrageous” by conventional ideologies. Both perhaps true, but nonetheless bothersome. What gives?
There’s an old saying in team sports that good defense wins games. I’ve never heard any similar statement applied to Judo but I think it should. If good defense does win games, why shouldn’t it also apply to winning matches in Judo? I can’t come up with a rational reason why it shouldn’t. To be more competitive at the international level, it’s time we change our training paradigm on a national scale to reflect this adage.
I believe that each community in America could support a Judo club if only we had enough coaches. Since we don’t have enough coaches maybe we should take a page from the American Youth Soccer Association (AYSO) when it set up shop almost fifty years ago. The AYSO recruited volunteer parents, mostly with little knowledge of soccer or coaching, provided them with a manual, a brief coaching clinic, a few balls and cones, and then cut them loose to coach their child’s soccer team. Many of these neophyte volunteers actually developed into relatively good soccer coaches after several years, in spite of knowing little initially or never having played the game themselves.