A fresh coat of Blue

It's official; one of our members gets to start wearing a brand-new, snazzy, Blue Belt.

It will take a while to actually arrive, of course, but he passed his test.

He is eligible to start attending the Blue Belt classes starting tonight.

We started on this week's technique already yesterday, but it's a pretty straight-forward one. There should be no problem bringing him up to speed on it.

He should be only the first of a group of White Belts making the move up over the next couple of months. There are three more who getting close. One might start testing in a couple of weeks, another by the end of June, and one somewhere in between.

It was starting to look as if we'd be down to 3 Blue Belt students by the fall. If all the possibles test successfully, we could instead have 7. That will make a much better group to work with.

With more people, you get to have more training partners. Each reacts differently, and is a different size, strength, and speed. Having more rather than less means learning more about how to apply each technique. It means even more when we're doing free-sparring drills, or semi-free. Each will have a style their own, and we'll have to learn how to handle each.

There is even more good news. There are a couple more White Belts who should be ready a couple of months after the current crop. It's still too far off to start predicting their commitment, but they seem keen enough. We might start getting a slow but steady stream of new Blue Belts as the year rolls on.

I hope it happens that way.