Sunday 6th October saw the club compete in the opening round of the new Hampshire Judo Team Championships.

The mens team was short on numbers but after enlisted the help of James from AWE in the 90+ category we were able to compete albeit with a disadvantage of only having three players.

Sergei and Johny did well in this our opening competition of the year. We managed one contest win against Southampton University; 2 against Holbrook and 1 against Fleming Park. Only the Priory/Portsmouth University team managed to pull the “clean sweep” despite our diminished numbers (especially when Johny had to pull out injured).

Along with a big debt of gratitude to James; we owe our womens team a huge thank you for their spectacular result!

Jonela who joins us as a novice this semester performed well in her first competition; especially as she has only a week or so of Judo to draw upon. Her first contest was against Eastleigh Judokwai and she won it decisively by Ippon against one of last years regular competitors. Second contest was against club mate Laura… more on that later.
Third contest she beat  her opponent from Holbrook by Wazari. In her last match she competed against AWE and another regular from last year; she led all the way before being caught for Ippon with what was probably the throw of the day.
The two wins put Jonela in third place in the category and amazing result given her inexperience and an outstanding testament to her potential.

Laura also represented the club in the womens division and is new to the team this year, joining us as a 1st Kyu. Her technical skills were apparent and she dispatched all her opponents to be the overall winner on the day.
Her final contest of the day was against the AWE, who had won all her matches by Ippon until meeting Laura in the final contest of the category. It was a very close match with Laura winning by a mere yuko in the end!
This put Laura in the lead by 1 win and gave her 1st place!

This year the points system for the championships mean that for the men every match won, the club earns 5 championship points. A loss one point. In the female category; it is slightly more complicated in that the points awarded are based on the number of women in the category.

So on Sunday we collected only 4 points from our mens team; but the women collected 8 points. This gave us 12 points in total and third equal overall with Fleming Park. Last year’s champions Southampton University start the season in second place and Priory/Portsmouth University lead after the first event.

The next event is on the third of November and now we are getting class numbers back to normal levels we should do even better!

Thank you to all that attended on the weekend and thank you for Gary Hill from Southampton Uni for the great photo.