When Barry Leisure Centre, like all other Leisure and Sports Centre’s in Wales closed its doors on March 20th, Sensei Rob started filming and posting video tutorials a few times a week for a month or so, to Vale Karate members via facebook, he realised however that this was not the way to keep his members fully invested, so from the end of April, he started arranging a full schedule of classes via zoom.

Including One-to-One’s, more classes were delivered during the lockdown months of May-August than ever before, an impressive fact, as before lockdown, the club ran four classes an evening four days a week and six classes on Saturdays!

In this way, Vale Karate has kept its members engaged and invested.
Although, inevitably, and regrettably around a quarter of members have not taken to the very different way of online Karate training, three quarters of the membership have adapted, trained regularly and very many have progressed!

It was this in mind, that Sensei Rob decided to conduct a zoom grading! The criteria was a strict as ever, with all members who were interested in grading having to attend regularly as well as attending two One-to-One sessions. A number were not ready to grade, but nevertheless almost fifty students graded via zoom between 10th-12th August.

The grading took place in small groups of usually two’s and three’s with a couple of individual gradings. Sensei Rob was very happy with the overall standard and as he only allowed those with a very good chance of passing to grade, all were successful.

On the evening of Friday August 14th, Sensei and Cathy arranged an Outdoor Presentation evening at Sully, where the Outdoor sessions have been taking place and a celebratory socially-distant evening was enjoyed by all in attendance.

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