Colorado Martial Arts News

(Aurora, CO) –The Warriors Martial Arts hosted the 2022 Colorado State Open Championships in Aurora CO on December 10^th, 2022.  The majority of the athletes were from Colorado, but we also had Farhod Negmatov, an Olympian from London Olympic Games, and members of the Tajikistan national team as guests.

The 2022 Colorado State Open Championships is part of a series that includes Lone Wolf Classic. We had over 100 competitors from 13 different schools and programs participate. There were many amazing sparring matches, grappling matches, board breaks and more. It was particularly great to have demo team performances, the Pueblo Strong Taekwondo, and Reunion TKD performing. “I could not be more proud of my students competing today at the Colorado Open Tournament hosted by Warrior’s Martial Arts! They were respectful, earned some medals, learned some important lessons, and most importantly had lots of fun! Thank you Master Kamil Latipov!!”-Said Alex Clary Head of Reunion TKD

Congratulations to Pueblo Strong Team and Gonzales TKD team for winning the championship second and third team standings..and a special congrats to Warriors MA for taking first place!

Sparring was the most popular event, especially in the color belt divisions due to the fact that students didn’t need to purchase Daedo E-socks. There were many fierce matches from black belt on down. “Since there aren’t many tournaments in CO, this is a great competition for athletes there. Our Warriors MA crew gained a lot of experience from it..” Said Kamil Latipov- head of Warriors MA Team

The competition featured 10 events in total – Traditional Forms, Team Traditional Forms, Team Creative Forms, Weapons Forms, Junk Weapons, Totem Forms, Blaster Pad Sparring, Olympic Sparring  Free Grappling. “I had a terrific experience competing; my competitor team and I are happy to be here after putting in a lot of effort to prepare for this event.” Said Elisa Strickler Gold medalist.

There was a wide variety of competitors in attendance, with ages ranging from 3 to over 65, and skills ranging from high international caliber to special needs. The tournament also formed the fall meeting in the Colorado K-12 League 2022-2023 Season, with Crescent View Academy taking top honors.

(Aurora, CO) – The Warriors Martial Arts hosted the 2021 Open Colorado Schools Tournament at Crescent View Academy in December 11th .

Although most of the competitors were from Colorado, the event drew athletes from Chicago, Arizona and Iowa. 2021 Open Colorado Schools Tournament is part of a series that includes the White Tiger Championship and Lone Wolf Classic Tournament. 

Students earn one piece, or shard, of a medal in each event and then can connect them together to form a super medal if they place in events 3 years in a row.

“ Our fighters did awesome job. We are first time in CO for such a great event. I’m surprised my students performed its excellent in high altitude state.” Said Artur Gasanov- head of Fit and Fight team from Chicago IL and 2x world Muy Thai Champion.

Sparring was the most popular event, especially in the color belt divisions due to the fact that students didn’t need to purchase Daedo socks. There were many fierce matches from black belt on down. “I’m impressed of my students how they are growing quickly and getting better especially in Olympic sparring and grappling.” Said Kamil Latipov- head of Warriors MA Team

The highlight of the tournament was at end with friendly MMA fights with students from different schools. Warriors Marital Arts and CVA WARRIORS , lead by Master Kamil Latipov brought a large team, and took first place in both the Championship and Team competitions.

The competition featured 4 events in total – Traditional Forms, Blaster Pad Sparring, Olympic Sparring and Free Grappling. There was a wide variety of competitors in attendance, with ages ranging from 3 to over 70, and skills ranging from high international caliber to special needs.

The tournament also formed the final meeting in the Colorado K12 League 2020-2021 Season, with Crescent View Academy taking top honors. Overall Team standings: 1. Warriors Martial Arts (CVA), CO 2. FIT and FIGHT TEAM, Chicago IL 3. Mireau Martial Arts, Arizona 4. 3. Eagle Martial Arts, CO

Students from Colorado Taekwondo Warriors school recently attended the AAU National championships in Florida. Coaches taking the team included Komiljon Latipov, Daler Latipov, and 2012 Olympian Alisher Gulov. The team also received amazing sponsorship from local trucking company Kavkaz Express

The tournament featured many large and competitive divisions. Some students had to proceed through 4 matches – just to earn a Bronze medal. The team earned 3 medals total. Coach Daler remarked “Congratulations to our warriors, on a very solid performance in the toughest tournament here in the US, everybody worked really hard for this tournament.” The results were particularly good considering that most of the team had only attended a few tournaments before, and only three of them had ever competed at the national level before.

 For questions or to join the team contact Kamil Latipov at (720) 400-0023

Athletes:

MUHAMMAD ALI

RASHEED SHAMANOV

REDA ESSEBAR

IMRAN SHAMANOV- Silver

LAILA LATIPOVA- Bronze

ALANA SHAMANOVA

KEMAL SARDAR- Bronze

KEMAL GUDER

Coaches:

KAMIL LATIPOV

ALISHER GULOV

DALER LATIPOV

BILL POTTLE (KAT Head Master)

(Colorado Springs, CO) – Over 1,100 participants descended on Colorado Springs for the 11th annual US Open Taekwondo Hanmadang July 25-27th. Participants ranged in ages from 4 to 83 and came from dozens of states and countries. A Hanmadang is a ‘martial arts festival’ and there are many different events, like forms, breaking, family forms, demonstrations, etc. There are no sport combat (sparring or grappling) events.  The event also served as the Taekwondo portion of the 2019 Rocky Mountain State Games. This means that all first place winners also qualified to participate in the 2019 State Games of America.  

Thursday started off with archery and knife throwing events in the Cheyenne Mountain Archery Range. The highlight was definitely the Dynamic Archery event, a 30+ minute race through the mountains where participants had to hit 18 different targets with only reusing one arrow. Thursday also featured numerous seminars as well as committee meetings.

Friday featured the most difficult division, the Championship Demo Team competition. White Tiger Martial Arts from Mill Creek, WA took home the top honors, and a coveted spot to perform at the opening ceremonies with the world famous Keimyung University Taekwondo Demo Team. 

Saturday featured many more events, such as recreational demo team, knife hand breaking, spin hook kick breaking, family forms, individual breaking, etc. 

There was also many special guests, including members of the Korean Parliament and former US Ambassador Chris Hill. One of the guests, Grandmaster Dong Sup Lee, is a 9th Dan who sponsored the bill to make Taekwondo the official national sport of Korea.

In the future, the tournament will alternate every other year with a combined USTC trip to Korea. You can see many more videos and pictures on the official Facebook page or you can view the complete results online. 

(Aurora, CO) – The Korean Academy of Taekwondo has come up with a machine learning model and associated spreadsheet that automatically groups competitors into divisions and prints brackets.

“Life isn’t fair”, so martial arts students should train to defeat opponents who are bigger and stronger. However, sports should be fair, so most martial arts tournaments are organized into divisions of similar athletes.

Large and official tournaments such as the Olympics, national championships, etc set the divisions ahead of time, and athletes will generally cut weight or have to qualify through previous victories, point rankings, etc.

Local tournaments can use those “regular” divisions, but this often results in a degraded customer experience (for instance, cutting to a lower weight division but no one is there so divisions are combined anyway, 9-10 year olds being grouped together even though their weights are far apart, when the 10 year old could have had a much better division with the 11 year olds, many demo matches or athletes without matches, etc).

This project uses the K means nearest neighbor in Google Colab to cluster athletes into divisions. The excel sheet also includes related functionality to create division names, and division score sheets (ie, for forms or weapons) as well as single or double elimination brackets.

When run on data from several previous tournaments, about 90% of the resultant divisions are good, and the other 10% should be adjusted manually before printing brackets. Manual adjustment will likely be much faster than parameter tweaking.

The system is open source, and anyone around the world is allowed to use it for free. You can see the full instructions and download the tool on the official github repository.

Age and weight are first normalized on a log scale, because they become less important as the value increases. For instance, it’s no problem for a 45 and 55 year old to face each other, but you would never face a 14 year old vs a 4 year old. The Log Base parameter determines the strength of this effect. For instance, if this number is high the algorithm will sooner put a 100lb person vs a 200 lb person than put a 45 lb person vs a 46 lb person.

There are many parameters that users can tweak to get the best fit for your individual data, or you can use the default parameters built in.

The 2018-2019 CO K8 League finished with a bang, with newcomers GVA Ft. Collins (Karnos-Kim TKD) coming from nowhere into the top 5, barely missing out on 4th.

MdM became the first team ever to 3-peat, scoring almost double the points of the next contender, and almost as much as the rest of the top 5 combined. Crescent View Academy was second, with Aurora Quest 3rd.

The league has now been through 8 years, with the following champions:

2011-2012 Champion: Aurora Quest Academy.

2012-2013 Champion: Global Village Academy.

2013-2014 Champions:  Aurora Quest Academy and Crescent View Academy.

2014-2015 Champion: Crescent View Academy

2015-2016 Champion: Aurora Quest Academy.

2016-2017 Champion: Montessori Del Mundo

2017-2018 Champion: Montessori Del Mundo

2018-2019 Champion: Montessori Del Mundo.

Aurora Quest and Montessori Del Mundo have now each won three times. It’s amazing to think that students who were kindergartners in the first season are now finishing 7th grade.

This Halloween, be safe out there! Today is an excellent opportunity for marital artists, especially children, to demonstrate and develop self control. As a special bonus, Tom Lynn Jr from the Academy Martial Arts shows us an important set of clown defense techniques.

(Aurora, CO) – The Korean Academy of Taekwondo hosted the 2018 White Tiger Championships at Rangeview High School on April 28th, 2018. Although most of the competitors were from Colorado, the event drew athletes from Wyoming, Tajikistan, and Iraq.

The White Tiger Championships is part of a series that includes the Twin Dragons Tournament and Lone Wolf Classic. Students earn one piece, or shard, of a medal in each event and then can connect them together to form a super medal if they place in events 3 years in a row.

This year’s tournament set a record with 375 competitors. Sparring was the most popular event, especially in the color belt divisions due to the fact that students didn’t need to purchase Daedo socks. There were many fierce matches from black belt on down.

Academy of Life and Leadership Taekwondo from Colorado Springs, lead by Grandmaster and Olympian Barb Kunkel brought a large team, and took first place in both the Championship and Recreational Demo Team competitions.

The competition featured 10 events in total – Traditional Forms, Team Traditional Forms, Team Creative Forms, Weapons Forms, Junk Weapons, Totem Forms, Blaster Pad Sparring, Olympic Sparring, Cloud Chess and Free Grappling.

There was a wide variety of competitors in attendance, with ages ranging from 3 to over 70, and skills ranging from high international caliber to special needs. The tournament also formed the final meeting in the Colorado K8 League 2017-2018 Season, with Montessori Del Mundo taking top honors.

Several colleges and universities sent teams, including CU Denver, MSU Denver, UNC Greely, and DU. MSU Denver led the way with 17 medals total, and CU Denver followed with 13.

Two competitors get ready to begin Totem Forms

After several hard fought blaster pad matches.