Oldham Sports Centre
5th March 2006

Thanks as always to the table helpers, referees and judges that make all tournaments tick and contribute enormously to the success of the day.

Choose a date and hope for the best. This was a bad day to run a tournament, with snow right across the country. I was expecting to arrive and probably leave a short time afterwards but we were pleasantly surprised when people began to come through the doors. Tournaments are a risky affair at the best of times but unfortunately ours coincided with the worst bit of weather this winter.

We were implementing the WKF scoring rules for the first time and so I hadn’t slept the night before. It was the usual feelings of anxiety and trepidation that all tournament promoters go through; would anyone turn up, would we have enough referees etc.

It turned out ok in the end although more officials would have been nice, we employed the two man mirror referee system, as most do, because trying to get enough officials to do the flag system seems at present to be impossible. The WKF rules are for ages of 16yrs plus and to my mind minimum grade 1st dan. It’s a very difficult job for referees to be working to a high level criteria and to balance that with a lower level technique. The throw is a case in point; how many lower grade karate students know how to break fall? Or would even expect to be thrown in a karate tournament, not many I would guess. Thankfully I don’t think anyone tried to execute a throw but I can imagine the mess if they had. Under the circumstances our referees did brilliantly and with more experience on the way with a number of events this year, the future looks good.

Many thanks to the following:
Dave Young, Brian Bentham, Orang Ranjbar, Derek Willoughby,Sam Stewart, Diane Vincent, Dave Parle, Mike Connor, Paul Elliott, George Cheshire and all the people that help on the day. Apologies if there are any omissions.