Westlock Family Taekwondo broke barriers and boards at the annual Whitecourt Taekwondo tournament Jan. 28, sending 21 competitors of all ages and collecting 42 medals and a trophy for board breaking.
“It was awesome, it was so much fun,” said school owner Shaune-Marie Hiebert. “This is the second tournament we’ve had as a club. The last one we did was in September, and we only had nine competitors there.
Aside from crushing the competition at board breaking, the local martial artists collected 13 gold medals, 13 silver medals and 16 bronze medals. They also will be able to keep the trophy in their club until the tournament rolls around again next year.
“Everybody did incredibly well considering it was almost everybody’s first time going to tournament,” said Hiebert. “I think the biggest triumph that everybody came back feeling pretty good about was the tile breaking competition.
Two teams from Westlock competed in the 11-team board breaking competition.
“It really brought the group together, everyone was cheering for each other.”
The club will now head back to the dojang to practice its sparring, which a lot of the martial artists were introduced to at the tournament.
“Most of the adults who were sparring were mainly wanting to give it a try. We’re not a really big sparring team, but we have been working with a sparring group in Whitecourt,” said Hiebert. “At the same time, our club is not as focused on the competitive sparring component of the art. We’re more focused on physical fitness and having fun as a group.”
The club is preparing for its next promotion night, where it will advance students who are ready to take their next belt level, which will be held near the end of March. After that, a new training session will begin in April.
“We’re really interested in getting some more adults and even some seniors involved. Though they wouldn’t be asked to do sparring,” said Hiebert with a laugh. “Although if they wanted to … ”
