Guest coaches + Farewell for Garth

Tonight's training was notable for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, we farewelled Garth, with a small financial grant to support him as he heads to Japan for a couple of months to soak up the culture and of course, further develop his judo. Garth is one of our most regular attendees, being at training most days for both judo and BJJ. Even with University study hampering his ability to train and compete as regularly as he has in the past, he's still found time to come in and help the kids classes and even managed to earn a National title in BJJ early in the year. We wish Garth luck as he fine-tunes his ukemi in the home of judo.

Secondly, we had a number of guests on the mat, in particular, members of New Zealand's 2014 Commonwealth Games and 2015 World Championships teams, Adrian Leat, Sam Rosser and Ryan Dill-Russell. They shared some of their competition waza with us, with Ryan going through some kumikata drills and Adrian taking us through his signature tornado uchimata before joining us for randoori.

We had about twice as many dan grades as kyu grades, giving us some quality judo as we close out the year. Training is still on this Friday and Saturday and information about training over the new year will be posted here and on social media so watch this space!