Congratulations to the following Yun Hap Members who took part in the 2012 National Championships and Festival.William Eggar – Gold medal in sparring + gold medal in creative poomsae + referee
Mia Gunning – Silver medal for sparring plus 7th place for poomsae
Katie Long – Gold medal for poomsae
Stuart Eggar – volunteered for all four days
Janelle Keighran – Qld State Team Manager
Kerry Manning – Qld Referee Director and referee
Steve Manning – Referee
Tim Eggar – Referee
Kate Eggar – Referee + Technical Judge + Qld Operations Manager
Though small, the team of dedicated Yun Hap competition crew again stood our club in good stead at the 2012 National Championships and Festival.
Our 3 athletes attending were William Eggar, Mia Gunning and Katie Long.
Katie, who recently moved from Brisbane to Atherton (and now Townsville – furthering her nursing career) has been training with some ‘remote’ support and proved her quality in achieving Gold for her red belt 18-29 years poomsae performance. Katie has been training with Kate Eggar and Janelle Keighran supporting her.
Mia participated in poomsae and sparring and performed well in 11-13 years 2nd Dan poomsae in a large and difficult division with very narrow scores separating the top players. Mia’s sparring performance included 3 fights with Mia winning the first two and initially looking like she might end up facing another Queeslander (Madison Goodwin) in the final. Maddie didn’t make it through the final and Mia faced a young girl from ACT whose competition experience far exceeded Mia’s. Though outclassed Mia showed great bravery and fought extremely well to end up with silver in sparring. Mia trains with Wayne Reeves who was unable to attend Nationals. Team Qld kicked into action with Mia coached in her sparring by Qld’s most experienced coaches. Due to flight needs Mia had the experience of working with Rob Muir, Denise Goodwin and Phil Monaghan who are great Qld coaches!
William participated in creative poomsae and sparring 14-17 years in red belt (Cho Dan Bo competes as red belt in competitions) and changed his song for creative poomsae just the week before (with assistance in early choreography from Janelle Keighran and assistance in finalisation of the choreography from Kate Eggar). His performance was to the recent hit ‘Gungnam Style’ and his costuming matched the film clip style. The poomsae can be found on our Facebook page and is very amusing! That won him a gold medal with another Queenslander winning silver in the same division. Will’s sparring had only 1 match against a Victorian from one of the toughest sparring clubs. This proved to be quite a challenge and dramatically came down to even scores at the end of the match. This resulted in a ‘Golden Point’ situation which Will won convincingly, giving him the gold medal. William was coached by Ameet Jamble (because he listens better to a coach who isn’t his mother!).
As usual, Yun Hap provided several officials for the event and our referees included Tim Eggar, Kerry Manning, Steve Manning and William Eggar (except when he was preparing for and completing his fight, of course) and Kate Eggar, who also assisted with technical judging across the four days of competition. Kerry led out the first sparring match of the event and Kate was Head of Court for technical judging courts and assisted in a dual ‘court management’ team for sparring courts. Tim and Steve were part of a significant group of referees and we tried hard to keep them both out of the ‘technical support’ roles but both were called upon at different times when there were system ‘issues’. Will supported refereeing and helped with inspection desk at different times. Kate also helped with inspection desk for a while (mostly due to the limited number of female referees participating). Stuart Eggar also contributed to the event volunteering for all four days. Our club also had Janelle Keighran contributing as Qld Team Manager and she did an outstanding job of following all our Qld participants and supporting as needed.
Kate and Tim Eggar also attended Taekwondo Australia’s Annual General Meeting while at the event.
All in all, it was a great trip and very worth the huge efforts by all concerned. A great experience with Team Queensland, provided by Taekwondo NSW on behalf of Taekwondo Australia.
