Growth

Someone asked me recently what I thought about the growth of the Yushikan as a dojo and as an organization so I thought I would share my thoughts on this with you and please feel free to share your thoughts on the matter.

As for the Yushikan main dojo, my dojo is a closed dojo, which means it is not open for anyone to walk in and sign up for a class. The criteria for being accepted into my dojo is not necessarily about being over selective, but more about being sure that the student is genuinely serious about studying the Art, whilst being one who is sincere and respectful. I keep the classes small on purpose so that I can maintain the quality of instruction, I have considered adding more students, but we will see. 
 

I would like more participation from my yudansha, some give a lot and train a lot, and others I see once a year, but again we will see. I am pretty sure that I will not ever open a commercial dojo again. Over the years, I have had a few and some nice ones at that. The current dojo is located on the same property as my home, so there are no distractions that would occur in a commercial setting and I like my little backyard dojo with its pond and garden, where I can teach and don't have to worry about handing out belts to keep students. My dojo is dedicated to training in Okinawan empty-hand and weapon martial arts. Our goals in training are the development of the practitioners’ body, mind, and spirit and the improvement of self-defense skills through the practice of traditional Okinawan martial arts. We train in a non-competitive environment; each member works not only to improve him or herself, but to help the other members improve as well.

My training method using junbi undo, hojo undo, kihon, kata, kumite, kakie, and conditioning drills does not take long to weed out the class, in the last year I have admitted 5 new students, none lasted more than a month before the stopped training, it isn’t that I abuse or work them to death, but I do expect them to work and train, we do lots of repetitions and maybe they get bored because they aren’t learning all the flashy kicks, I don’t know.

As for an organization, I belong to and am in a director position for a few, so I focus on those, but as for the Yushikan growing into an organization, I suppose that will happen, but growth will depend on the yudansha, which means that yudansha students who move should consider beginning karate programs at the local YMCA, Boys and Girls Clubs, local Church, City Recreation Departments, and or in a park. Teaching in this way contains no financial risks for the instructor as they do not have any overhead. Also there are those people who are black belts from other groups that come to me, I have had several, but to date I have only accepted a couple into our group.

So yes, I would like to see growth, but I want it to be good quality, what good is having a large group if they suck? So I guess a small steady growth is better, perhaps my approach is not the best for growth, because I do not promote often and we train over and over on the same things, but I would rather have one excellent student then 100 mediocre students.