What a great weekend! Cork hosted a tremendous few days of kendo seminar’s, individual, team and ladies competition and a grading seminar. Well done to the organising committee and especially the coordinators, Eamonn, Mark and Jason for taxi-ing everyone and everything around.
Everyone at Cork Budokai needs to give Dirk Bakker a really HUGE thank you for all the effort he put in to making amazing scoreboards and custom tsuba for sensei. He put in long hard hours to design and build works of art, so much more than was required and we are indebted to him. Arigato gozaimasu.
Congratulations to Jason and Vince for organising such a great event and Clare, Kerri, Willow, Riley, Liam, Marcin, Jayo and his missus, David and all the other helpers from Dublin and beyond for their assistance. And of course thanks to the competitors and sensei for making the weekend a success.
The Cork team (Robin, Szilárd and Brendan) came joint third with a Hungarian team and Dublin won the first and second spot. In the individuals Dublin came first and second (Lee and Andy) and Dublin also came first and second in the ladies category (Nanami and Kathryn).
But the real result was that Irish kendo has dramatically improved over the last few years.
Congratulations to Eamonn, Jason and Mark on passing shodan this weekend. Unfortunately Dirk and Artur could not grade but I know they will get a chance soon. You have all put in some very hard training and efforts and I’m glad its paying off.
Cork has passed several milestones in the last 12 months with internal goals like the kids class and going to 3+ sessions a week and bringing over sensei’s but we have also achieved several international milestones, like results at competitions, ladies representing Ireland and first lady yudansha. In the last 6 months we have had 5 shodan grades and 2 sandan grades added to our club.
Everyone at Cork Budokai should be very proud of our little club. Well done and lets keep moving forward!
Tags: cork, goodwill taikai, iigt, iigt 2010