Brunel Judo

Adding to Brunel’s habit of never leaving a grading without a grade, several more successes were had today at London’s Budokwai.

Tom Mabon - 9th kyu -> 8th kyu (yellow to orange)

James Diamond - 5th kyu -> 4th kyu (green to blue)

Ali Israilov - 6th kyu -> 5th kyu (lower green to upper green)

Rob Chahin - 2nd kyu -> 1st kyu (lower brown to upper brown)

Omar Anaz - 1st kyu -> 1st dan (upper brown to black)

Note that Omar entered the grading needing to win 3 fights to get his black belt. After losing the first and winning the next 2 he was given a line up of 3 more fights without a break in between, and won all of them, so congratulations. (This kind of win automatically results in a black belt, regardless of how many fights the player needed to win at the beginning)

First off, some sad news: Thursday 13th will be the last training session of the 2007/2008 academic year. Training will resume when you all return from the summer break a little wiser and a little less fit. This is earlier than we usually stop training, but it’s unavoidable - if you want to continue training there are plenty of clubs in the West London and surrounding areas. Either Google them or send an e-mail to Rob at the chairman address and he can point out the most suitable ones.

After this training session, please join us in Bar Zest. It’ll be a chance to say farewell to the club for the next 6 months, but more importantly, will be a “sort of AGM” and a chance to give out BUSA information. If you’ll be training here next year, especially if you’re a Brunel student, or if you’re attending BUSA with us this year, you should definitely attend.

The AGM part of the meeting will be spent discussing options for next year, including candidates for next year’s committee, and ideas for club development. It’s your chance to tell us what you think needs to change, and we know there are things worth changing. How should we spend all those mat fees we’ve been collecting?

The BUSA info will mainly be clearing up details for those that haven’t fought there before. If you can’t make it but are attending BUSA, again let Rob know and he can e-mail you some information. Basically, we’re leaving on Friday lunchtime and coming back on Sunday evening.

Still trying to coerce travel and accommodation information out of the Union, but in the meantime, the squad lists are up on the BUSA website:

Click here to begin obsessing about who you might be fighting

As well as the recent club membership reminder, please make sure you have a valid BJA license before attempting to receive a competitive grade (anything beyond your yellow belt). You WILL NOT be able to grade or compete with the club without this license!

More details about the license can be found in a VERY recent news post, here.

If you’ve now been training with us for more than a few sessions, you NEED to become a club member.

Our official member list only had 9 members on it. Specifically, we’re most concerned about those of who you who plan to compete on behalf of Brunel at BUSA next year, and those of you that are training every single lesson but still haven’t gotten around to joining the club.

Given that our Christmas social organisation is underway and it should be happening in a few weeks, we can exclude non-members from the freebies, so make sure you join as soon as possible.

The Student Union are really pushing all of the clubs on campus over this - there will be spot checks to make sure that those people training and competing are actually members, and we don’t want to have to take action against those that arent.

In case you missed it elsewhere on the site or in recent news posts, you join the club through the brunelstudents.com website, and you NEED to be a Sports Fed member before you can join.

It’s been in the forum for some time and not many people have let us know that they’ll be there, but there will be a grading at Harefield Judo Club on Sunday 29th April.

You can find details of the grading in this forum topic.

For those of you that haven’t been to Harefield before, you can find details of location and whatnot in the previous Harefield grading topic, accessible via this magical link.

Currently the grading topic doesn’t have a time for when we’re starting, but we’ll try and get that info up soon.

Anyone that attended BUSA will have noticed the multitude of cameras at matside.

We’ve found at least one of those photographers, and he got some very good shots. You can check the pictures out at:

http://davehphotography.co.uk/

The web versions have been resized and watermarked, because the guy needs to earn a living somehow. All of the photos there are available to buy as prints, or you can just browse his gallery and see pictures of yourself looking stupid.

Less than a week after we got back from BUSA (and after about 8 hours in terms of the webmaster’s free time..), the first batch of videos are up!

I won’t even go into the ins and outs of how much effort this has been to get them up this quickly (Eamonn..) - just go and watch them.

Click here for motion picture fun!

Please save them to your computer rather than watching them directly from the website - we’ll save bandwidth, and thusly money, that way.

Edit: All of the videos are now up, except for the ones on Danny’s videocamera, which we don’t have.

Photos from BUSA are now available in the gallery!

The videos are forthcoming. They take more time, and we need somewhere to put them, but that’ll all be sorted soon enough.

Due to popular demand, we’ll now be leaving at 1pm, not 12pm.

Meeting place is the same - the minibus car park at the back of the Student Union. If you don’t know where this is, you need to contact someone from the club as soon as possible.