It has been a big weekend hosting the Queensland Kendo Renmei’s Summer Seminar and grading opportunity. Toowoomba turned on near perfect summer weather for our visitors from Cairns, Townsville, Gin Gin, Sunshine Coast, Brisbane and the Gold Coast, for training across all three supported discipline — Kendo, Iaido and Jodo.

While COVID-related restrictions meant that we were not able to offer a grading in Jodo, all candidates acquitted themselves well in their respective Iaido and Kendo gradings. In particular, Gin Gin and Toowoomba folk did us all proud with Quentin Brandt double grading to achieve 4KYU, Ivan Hills achieving 2KYU, and both Kateena Martin and Sean Thompson realising the benefit of all the hard work they had put in to be successfully meet the challenge of 2DAN.

I wanted to thank everyone who went above and beyond to help with the event. This includes our grading panel members and those filling support roles, those that instructed across the weekend, and those that filled in all of the important background jobs to set up and clean up. In particular I wanted to mention the Gin Gin crew for their efforts Sunday afternoon to return the CBRC to the state we found it, and to Takashi Itakura sensei, who as first to arrive, last to leave, filled many roles from staffing the reception desk to stepping into a teaching role at short notice on Saturday when our scheduled person did not arrive.

And so we now refocus on what is upcoming for 2022. The next major events will be a pencilled-in regional kyu grading in March and then the Winter Seminar in July. We will also be encouraging more regular inter-Club events across all three arts and hopefully more opportunities to engage in taikai. Rest up today, everyone. Will look forward to seeing everyone later this week as we start to wind down the training clock on 2021!