CEO blog – April 2022.

As another busy month of activity draws to a close we are looking ahead to a packed spring and summer of training, competitions, seminars and gradings!

Events coming up

With the European Taekwondo Championships in Manchester a mere 41 days away as I write this, I hope you are looking forward to seeing the action. Whether in person, on TV or streamed online it’ll be an incredible four-days of high-quality, high-impact action and a chance to see our fantastic GB Taekwondo athletes competing on home soil for the first time since the World Championships of 2019.

Please get tickets and come support them if you can!

We’re also pleased to have opened registrations for the National Dan Grading on the 19th June at the National Taekwondo Centre in Manchester. The grading will be an open, transparent and high-quality event with an incredible panel of respected Grand Masters that will give candidates a memorable experience.

We invite all British Taekwondo instructors to support this truly National Dan Grading and put forward students for the event.

And invite masters to come observe the event to see what we are trying to achieve in the spirit of cooperation with all sections of the British Taekwondo family.

To support the grading candidates, we are also putting on a Dan grading seminar on the 29th May, again in Manchester. Even if you’re not grading – it’s a great experience to train alongside fellow Taekwondo lovers with expert tuition from a range of high Dan and experienced people. Sign up here.

We’ve also got several Poomsae and Sport Taekwondo events, competitions, and training sessions for a range of experience and age levels in the calendar so good luck to everyone taking part – it really is great to see so many things going on after the long Covid lay off.

It’s particularly great to see the sport selection events for Cadet & Under 21 teams – another first and huge thanks to the sport performance team for putting these on!

Again, good luck to the members fighting for those places.

Technical Department Conference

We held the first Technical Department Conference at the end of last month.

It was certainly a packed day of discussions involving board members and our amazing group of technical department leaders, all sharing ideas and tackling the big questions so we can all grow and improve together.

The session highlighted again the superb efforts of all our technical departments – all volunteers, who have committed so much time and energy to supporting British Taekwondo and help move our Taekwondo family forward.

Membership price increase

Following several years maintaining the membership fee at its current rate, we needed to introduce a small price increase to ensure we continue to meet the challenging times and changing needs of our members.

We are, after the enforced pause of the pandemic, also building capacity to enable us to deliver on our 10-year strategy promises to create new activities, services, and pathways for clubs, coaches and members and provide you with high quality support.

I hope that you have already begun to see improvements.

Whilst a price increase is not ideal, we have tried to keep it to a minimum and communicated this across email to our clubs, on our website and across social media to be clear, open and transparent with everyone with a single message.

Club news and member updates

Finally, we continue to share stories from our members, and it’s been wonderful to hear from clubs, instructors and individual members as we emerge from the last two years of lockdowns and stop/start interruptions.

From small and new clubs, to established clubs and veterans of the Taekwondo game, we want to share your good news, updates and events across the Taekwondo family.

We’ve also had clubs joining or re-joining us from the wider Taekwondo community, again hopefully a sign that things are steadily improving!

As well as our website you can keep up-to-date with news, events, updates and stories across our social media accounts.

I hope you have a great month ahead and I look forward to seeing some of you at upcoming events.

Ian

Ian Leafe

Chief Executive