Was anybody here at the last round of the Victorian National All Styles? Do you see when the brawl happened in the final of the Mens Open Continuous Sparring? Also, what are your feelings on NAS? Our club attended for the first time this year, and we were a little disappointed by the standard of the refereeing. On a positive note, the comraderie between different styles was nice to see. Thoughts or comments?
You probably won't get many positivew responses about the NAS on here. It's run by the same guys that run Blitz magazine, ensuring that it gets great publicity. They talk about it being open to all styles, but treally it is about 80% GKR, and the other 20% is a few independent karate based clubs, and the occasional kung fu club. My company (martial arts equip distributor) has about 240 clients around australia, which include some of the largest tkd and karate clubs around, and not a single one of them will go near NAS. There are a lot of better tournaments out there.
Well overall, we didn't have a very positive experience. Our club had a very dissapointing experience where a referee came over to us(After a match had finished) and started verbally attacking one of our members, and our style, which is hardly in the spirit of the competition. I am not interested in competing again. And I would say that 80% GKR is being conservative! Was it started by a GKR club? We had thought of hosting our own tournament next year, and opening it up to other styles; with ITF TaekwonDo rules
No, it wasn't started by GKr - it is run by Silvio Morelli, who is also the Editor or some such with Blitz Magazine. Morelli and Bob Sullivan (GKR Founder) are on fairly close terms - not sure if that is through freindship or some sort of monetary arrangement, but GKR gets relatively good press in Blitz due to their results in NAS. I have a feeling that NAS probably started with the best of intentions, but over the years has just become a steaming heap
