It is always a very proud moment for us when we grade somebody to black belt. It represents thousands of hours and many years of hard training. Jelena did extremely well in her junior black belt and performed very confidently indeed.

Keegan was outstanding in every way and provided a display of his knowledge and skills that ranks as one of the very best. Keegan started training with us 10-years ago as a junior. He proceeded to get his junior black belt and successfully crossed over to the adults class. He is one of only a handful that has managed to do so and it shows a huge amount of inner strength on his part. Many thanks go to the dedication shown by Jon Hopkins who spent countless hours of his own time to guide Keegan through the last part of his journey to black. See the photos section of our website for good shots of the grading. Well done Jelena, Keegan and Jon!

The NZ Bugeikan club is 10-years old this term and we are racking our brains to think of a suitable way to celebrate this...if any of you have any suggestions, then please let us know.

I remember as if yesterday, the day that we first opened up our doors in NZ. We had spent a year training with Terry Hill and Bruce Morgan in order to find out if Kiwi clubs were run any different from in Sweden. They were. Also, we wanted a break from running clubs and, although Terry's club wasn't much fun, Bruce's club was great - it was nice to go there to just train and not have to worry about planning the sessions and allocating instructors etc. We also had a great weekend camp training for James Sumerac (8th Dan) in Wangerei.

Well, the doors opened for the first time and we had a full class of adults and a full class of kids right from the very start (Walter and Keegan are the only ones left - quite normal!). Helena and I were, of course, super fit back then and there were a large number of wide eyed white belts in front of us...only Walter and Tony had had any martial arts experience. We had forgotten how it felt to teach a whole class of beginners - everybody was in various states of unfitness and the whole class had the co-ordination that you would expect from beginners - the lesson plan went out the window and we had to take it very slowly. The benefit was, of course, that everybody was at the same level and we had great fun training as a whole class for quite a while.

People complained and groaned on the second class - they were stiff and sore not having moved after years of sofa, beer and television. We quickly became friends after they realised that we weren't going to be their perception of Japanese masters demanding people to wax our cars, paint our fences and paint our house (we missed out on a good opportunity there!!).

And from there the club has evolved...you had to witness my rapid decline in health, endure our fatigue from hard days at work and study, but you stuck with it. The difficulty now is to successfully cater to everybody's needs as we have such a huge spread of grades that almost everybody is at a different stage of learning. Without the dedication shown by Jon, Dale and Walter, we would not have coped - a deep and heart-felt thanks guys!

We have a very strong foundation now and I hope that the next ten years will be as fun and rewarding as the last ten years

This year is significant in many other ways too:

• It is 35-years since I started training

• It is 26-years since Helena started training

• It is 20-years since we graded to 1st Dan black belt

• It is 20-years since we started running clubs

Time goes by far too quickly!

We had a great summer camp this year. Even if the pictures on the website say otherwise, we actually did a lot of training. It was great to spend those days on really high level stuff and we all walked away with some new ideas to incorporate into our training.

Last year, we also trialled a one-session-per-week kids class and starting up a new instructors class. Both of these initiative have proven to be very successful. The kid's classes do not seem to have suffered in any way as most kids train once a week anyway. The instructors class has been very useful as it has allowed us to devote the remaining adult's classes to teaching, knowing that we have a session dedicated to the instructors - we were beginning to find it a little hard to juggle for a while. We shall continue with this.

There is a new article in the articles' section  on our website. This article was written by Fredrik Yderström who was one of our students in our Swedish club. He was the first black belt we ever graded and he always was a natural - very talented indeed. 11-years ago, he moved to China to further pursue his martial arts training. He is now the first non-Chinese person to graduate with a degree in Sports Education (majoring in martial arts) from the Beijing Sports University. He had to learn to speak and write Chinese fluently to study. His article, which I have now translated from Swedish, describes some of his journey and it is fascinating. He learned several different Chinese styles but specialised in a full-contact style called Sanda, winning several important international competitions in the process. It is a remarkable achievement and we are trying to persuade him to visit us and teach us some of what he has learned.

Health wise, I have had a bit of a setback. My lungs are simply not allowing me to exercise in a vigorous manner. I hope that this is just a passing phase but, for now, I am going to have continue to teach from the sidelines for a while.

• Kids (one training session per week) - $40 per term

• Adults (one training session per week) - $60 per term

• Adults (two training session per week) - $100 per term

• Instructors (three training session per week) - $40 per term

Immediate families with more than two members training will be allowed 50% discount on the third family member. Please pay as soon as you can after the start of term: the dates for next term are:

Wednesday 13^th February – Wednesday 16^th April.