I've no idea what Judo Scotland's stance on this is, as their website is down again. There been rumours of an increase in the importance of the technical requirement at gradings for the last couple of years, but I've not heard anything about losing the kyu grade competitive element altogether. Mind you, would Judo Scotland have any choice in the matter, seeing as how they fall under the BJA's umbrella?
Our dojo is under the USJA, which goes by a point system. You have to have so many points to be able to test. For example, for green belt say you need 12 points. For each class you get 1/10 a point, for competition 1 point, for winning your match 1 point, if you beat a higher belt, 1 point, so on and so forth. Personally, being of the subset of "older martial artists" I really don't want to compete. At least not at this juncture, maybe when I become more experienced. But this way, people who do want to compete are rewarded, where as people who don't want to compete aren't punished. I like this way, you go progress as quickly or as slowly as you want.
For the record, where there used to be 9KYU grades (all of which had to be competed for), there are now just 5. Yellow belts (old 9KYU) are now 5KYU Orange belts (old 8KYU or 7KYU) are now 4KYU Green belts (old 6KYU or 5KYU) are now 3KYU Blue belts (old 4KYU or 3KYU) are now 2KYU and Brown belts (old 2KYU or 1KYU) are now 1KYU That's about the only decent thing to come out of the new structure. Your club coach can sign you off for your equivalent new KYU grade if you have an old grade recorded in your license. The BJA used to be more competition orientated than almost all other judo NGBs. Now, it is one of the least competitive. Even less so than the BJC. The BJC still has limited competition element, and batsugen promotions are possible). We now have none of this in the BJA. The new sylabus is quite frankly a ridiculously radical shift on emphasis in too short of a time period (~3 months). Some of the new tecniques are downright stupid. I'm just happy I got my ikkyu before this daft scheme was inroduced EDIT (needed another rant): Whilst before the DAN grade competitive element was a step up (nobody who'se seen a line-up can disagree), the main difficulty was with the theory side. Now, we're going to have ikkyus who've never competed before trying to work through a line up of other ikkyus who've never competed. What we then get are mediocre brown belts beating other mediocre brown belts and gaining a meaningless black belt. It's a shame really, because this has all come about because 'the powers that be' decided we weren't winning enough medals so we MUST be technically inferior!?! Well if you look in enough detail, you'll see that we don't seem to win many medals in anything - we just don't seem to be a great sporting nation compared to many others at this time. If anyone thinks we're gonna get olympic/world medals from this change they're sorely mistaken! Regardless of your view on british judo players, it's hard to deny that BJA players are of a higher competitive level than BJC ones, whilst BJC players are better technically (SWEEPING GENERALISATION BUT IT'S NOT UNFOUNDED!). All we'll get now is BJA players coming down to the same level of their BJC counterparts.
I've heard the main reason for the change is actually because the BJA can't retain enough people, it's haemoraging memberrs because the gradings are too hard
That's what they say... I'm not convinced. They say the biggest drop out is at junior 6MON (when competition becomes mandatory). They also fail to notice that this is normally the age when children start playing football at school, get into girls etc. When I was a junior (not that long ago!), we had to compete for EVERY MON grade. there were loads of us, and believe it or not the highest level of dropout was still around orange belt! I think that's the BJA's clever excuse to push their crappy new syllabus through! It won't help retention! Regardless, the biggest change is to the senior syllabus. I'm not even slightly convinced that adults are dropping out because the gradings are too hard. If this is the case, then they shouldn't be doing judo anyway!!! I'll tell you one thing for sure... this new syllabus is a lot harder than the old one! There are some very obscure techniques (an the illustrated guide is useless). I'm pretty sure that it'll reduce retention rates further - the people that would have dropped out anyway willstill drop out, and those that like to compete will get fed up. Can you imagine this happening in Japan? The kodokan grades are notoriously harder - if you don't like it, tough! They don't make exceptions for moaning, disgruntled people with no attention span of perseverance. Neither should we. I know a fair few highly ranked players/officials in the BJA who are not happy with these changes too!
Makes me glad that I'm with an independant judo club, the only bad thing being when I do get round to grading there aren't that many new starters who are adults (I started when I was 39 and am now 40) and I'm not that bothered about competitions either. Do the BJA have a over 35 novice section at their competitions?
I believe the BJA or BJC 'Masters' divisions start at this age - maybe both. At the competitive gradings it was done on weight, with age taken into consideration where necessry.
Right, I thought that the masters where for people who had a lot of judo experience and were older, do they have novice sections in the masters competitons? I've google it but come up with little info in this regard. Does the gradings also go by belt? If it was only weight then you could be put up against a higher grade with a lot more experience and get thrown all over the place!
Hi, I can’t honestly see what the fuss is about (maybe I would have done when I was younger). However, I’ve now experienced gradings in the UK (BJA) and in France where there are no competition requirements below 1st kyu attempting their 1st dan; and, French kyu grades have nothing to be envious about compared to British kyu grades (and I’m not saying that they’re vastly better either). It depends of course on the coach but generally the emphasis is made on the correct way of performing the techniques rather than knowing the Japanese name for it, although this does tend to get stricter as the grade gets higher. Surely this does not mean that the UK kyu grades would be without competition experience either; this would be picked up during other competitive events. Also, I thought that competition was only the tip of the iceberg as far as judo is concerned, at least this is what I’ve come to understand, but again maybe when I was younger I would have disagreed with this point of view.
I'm sure there's a 'veteran' category too. They used to go by belt when there was competition. If you had to fight people of the next grade up, this wouuld be taken into consideration. Likewise with facing players of the grade down, you would be expected to win. It was just generally structured to get the best matches possible - normally either someone similar to yourself, someone bigger but a lower grade, or a higher grade who was lighter. It worked out fairly evenly in the end!
