By Hana C.
Hana is Youth Level 3 (Orange) student at Wu Dao and won first place in her division
About a month ago, I attended my first Kung Fu tournament, which took place in Boston, on a Saturday. I was signed up to compete in the forms division, and was working on Xiao Hong Quan at the time. The day of the tournament, I woke up at 9AM, which for me is an extremely early time to get up on a Saturday morning. After having a filling breakfast, I spent about an hour or so practicing the form on the porch, along with Shira, who was also entered in the same division. There were still a few moves that were far from perfect, and which I tended to trip up on. However, we didn't spend too much time going over the form that morning, because we had already been working on it for at least half a year, had already tested for the next belt, and did not want to get too tired of it before the actual tournament. After a quick lunch, we were lucky enough to get a ride to Boston.
The facility where the tournament held was surprisingly small. It was the first Kung Fu studio I had been in other than Wu Dao, and the small space emphasized how big and accommodating Wu Dao's training area is. I had been warned before hand that my form might move me outside the boundaries that had been set, and was prepared to have to take an awkward step back if that was the case. After filling out the required paperwork, we had a good amount of time before the teens were scheduled to perform the forms for the judges, and so we watched the two ongoing events, which at the time were push hands and the forms of the younger students. Many of the students there were from Wu Dao, and although I might be biased, I honestly thought that their forms and their performance were amazing. Our uniform also seemed to be the most "official", as a lot of other schools had the same pants, but required only a T-shirt. I was also proud to see Rom win his entire division with a very martial performance.
I had expected there not to be many people in our division, but it turned out that there were enough to split us into a boys group, and two girls groups based on experience. Three boys from other schools went first. Their forms were very sharp and quick, and I was impressed by their power and clean performance. Next, the three girls who had been training the longest went first. One of them performed a Karate-style form that involved a lot of hissing and not very much movement, as opposed to many of the other forms I had observed.
In my division, Shira and I were both performing the same form, and she went first. In my opinion, her form was almost perfect: it was executed cleanly and with more power than usual. Luckily, when I performed the form, there was enough room that I did not have to shuffle. I did mess up in a few places, but the momentum of the form made it easy to play off the mistakes and keep going with relative fluidity.
Overall, I learned a lot from this first tournament. It definitely confirmed that repetition is key; because of how many times I had done the form before, I wasn't completely thrown off when I made a mistake. I also felt that if I had practiced just a bit more, those mistakes could have been avoided. Hopefully, this experience will help me in future tournaments, which I definitely plan on attending.
