Niagara

Maybe some pictures later, though this is written too soon after the event to sort through the multitude of pictures taken on the trip.

Going up to the falls on the Canadian side is really a pretty easy trip through some great country-side:  western PA and NY are just gorgeous.  There's residential driving along with the more typical highway drive.  The drive is easily navigable and not too long—Google's estimation of six and a half hours wasn't too far off, although we stopped for gas and food a couple of times.  Customs wasn't bad, either, at least once we got to the border agents.  (We were fairly delayed on the way out by another car in front of us.)

The tournament itself left a lot to be desired.  Though populated with the occasional quality individual and martial artist, in general I was unimpressed.  The Canadian hosts were largely pleasant and polite, as is their reputation—but we were in French Canada, and the French were mostly standoffish if not rude, at least in my experience.  In terms of quality artists, I judged no outstanding forms, though there were some that were passable.  The kid who took fourth place in one of my divisions turned out to be a more-than-respectable fighter with good ring awareness and movement and a devotion to the reverse punch and solid defense.  I complimented him on it later, and his dad went away beaming.

The fighting was pretty rough.  The 13-year-old males division (for which I did some coaching) had two or three nosebleeds.  MC has blood on his shoes now.  Stupidly, the rules don't call for an automatic DQ on drawing blood, so as to avoid sissies (that's not quite what they say in the rules, but it's pretty close).  They also incentivize shots to the head by giving two points for a kick to the head and one point for all other techniques.

That isn't the main reason that one kid was concussed and sent to the hospital on a stretcher (thank God he wasn't seriously injured, though at the time I heard that he didn't have any feeling in his extremities), but it definitely contributes.  Anyone can hit hard, but it takes skill to hit with control and precision.  And that's all sparring is:  advanced tag.  There is a time and place to learn how to hit and take a hit, but a tournament is not it.

There were some crybabies and tough nuts there, too, though.  One kid completely flopped on a pretty insignificant hit; not sure if he was taking the soccer-school-of-thought on how to handle contact or not.  Another one broke her hand during stick fighting (padded sticks, yes, but the handle came down awkwardly and broke one of the metacarpals, I think) and sucked it up and fought through sparring as well...pretty respectable.

All in all, it's not a group of people I really look forward to associating with.  I just realized that we've already committed to working with this guy again in January, and that he's going to bring people in support of our tournament in April.  I'm hoping that I can convince MC and the crew to put together something super professional—suits on the judges (if you're not competing), a square ring, good traditional rules and all that.  Hopefully it'll help to mitigate some of the less desirable elements while emphasizing the good ones.