Despite the snow and frigid temperatures, Wesleyan’s taekwando team is getting into gear and making preparations for spring semester competition with practices beginning this week. Excited to return to competition, team members will get all they can handle at three major competitions this season. A popular sport in the Ivy League, Wes will do battle with a distinguished list of schools that includes Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, West Point, and Yale.
Taekwando has been in existence at Wes since the nineties, but died down for a few years before Bryan Ma ’05 and Kingsley Choi ’05 renewed University interest in the sport. This year’s team boasts a wide variety of skill levels from white belts, the novice members, to black belts in its various degrees.
“I’m really proud of the taekwando team this year; it’s the first year we’ve had a full women’s team to compete at tournaments,” said Steph Marcus ’05, Publicity Director.
As a club team, the organizers and managers deal with a variety of obstacles that other sports teams at Wes take for grante—finding and reserving practice space, renting team buses, fundraising, etc. But this team just meets all of these challenges in stride.
“We have about thirty regular members, with about half competing, and we struggle for resources,” Ma said. “Hopefully, if our club keeps growing we will get some recognition.”
The first of three tournaments for the squad is set to take place at the end of February at Princeton. The second and third will take place at Columbia and Yale, respectively, with competition at all three events being made up of teams from the Ivy-Northeast Collegiate Taekwando League (INCTL). The INCTL was started in the early 1980’s by Dartmouth and Yale, and spread to other Ivy League schools. Among them, Wesleyan remains one of the smallest schools in terms of numbers, but the team has persevered and garnered success regardless.
“We feel like underdogs at tournaments, but our lower belts have shown great promise,” said black belt Si Hyung Woo ’08. “Our future as a team looks very bright.”
Competitively, the team struggled through the fall semester, but hopes are high for the spring tournaments and the veterans expect the squad to bounce back. This is not the only priority for the team this semester, as maintaining interest in the team and increasing participation is always a concern. Unlike varsity sports teams at Wes, the taekwando team operates and grows without an active recruiting program, and runs the annual risk of dying down if unable to attract new members. The program has had tremendous success building the program up, drawing a wide variety of active participants from the Wesleyan student community, fueling optimism about the future of these efforts. Across the Ivy League and even here at Wes, the sport is quickly becoming the new craze for fitness-minded students.
“Wes students like fitness and staying healthy and I cannot think of a better sport,” Woo said. “It’s practical for self-defense and its gaining popularity. I am pretty confident we’ll get more recruits.”
“Hopefully we will be able to leave this legacy behind here at Wesleyan.,” said Ma, who trained under a former 2000 Olympic coach. “We always want new people, new members.”
For now, the team continues to prepare for tournament competition every night in Freeman and looks forward to their exhibition at the Mabuhay show in April.
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