The Tae Kwon Do Club - notable for walking around campus carrying big white and red pads - competed in the National Collegiate Taekwondo Association Tournament last weekend in Cambridge, Mass., with expectedly outstanding results.
Brown placed third overall in the tournament, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and first in the novice (non-black belt) division. Athletes at the tournament participated in two types of competition: poom-se, a demonstration of forms by a lone contestant rated by judges, and sparring, or kyoruki, in which competitors earn points for hand or foot attacks to the midsection or foot attacks to the head. In both disciplines, competitors are divided by sex, weight class and belt level.
In all, Brown's 40-member contingent took home 29 medals, 24 by the team's colored belts. Six team members won medals in both forms and sparring: Sharon David '06, Catrina Joos '07, Joseph Leung '07, Jackie Dwulet '08, David Atkinson '08 and Lydia Sharlow '09.
"That's about what we expected," said third dan (degree) black belt Joseph Fungsang '06, one of the team's instructors. "We set a really high bar and we reached it."
The forms competition was held Friday night at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The following day, the team arrived at the Johnson Athletic Center at MIT at 8 a.m., began sparring at 9 a.m. and finally left at 10 p.m. - a day that "was pretty chaotic," according to club President Kwan Lin '07, currently a blue belt with a red stripe.
"(The sparring competition) is pretty tiring," Fungsang said. "When you're not sparring, you're cheering other people on. The whole day is screaming your lungs out."
The team's solid showing was the product of an intense training regimen that began over winter break. Some team members came back a week early for "training camp," during which they participated in three-a-days - running and conditioning in the morning, skills work in the afternoon and light sparring at night.
Once classes started, the team's schedule only lightened slightly. There are morning practices every weekday at 7 a.m. and two-and-a-half-hour evening practices three times a week.
"We don't explicitly say they're mandatory," Lin said. "The people who will be competing are expected to be there. People are actually pretty good about showing up."
Even though nationals have passed, the club's season is not over. It has two remaining Ivy-Northeast Collegiate Taekwondo League tournaments at Yale and Columbia.
