Tournament

The kids are adding to their trophy stashes, with new ones awarded at the New Mexico Taekwondo Championships.  Basia's forms competition was first.  As a blue belt, they do Tae Geuk O Jang.  She did it beautifully and got one of the best scores we saw all day, for any belt rank.  Unfortunately, a little girl in her age/belt category got 1 tenth of a point higher, leaving Basia in 2nd.  I was proud.  She was not.  Brishen then did the same form in his category.  He also did very well and got 2nd place.  I really wish this tournament had the first two kids go head-to-head because I'm pretty sure Brishen should have had first place.  I'm just a mom, though.

A few hours of waiting later got us to Basia's sparring competition.  She was smaller than the three other girls.  I watched the first two girls spar each other and was a little worried because their style was so different from Basia's.  I wondered how she would do against them.  Before she got to spar the winner of that match, she had to first win her own match.  She came out like a crazy girl, as is her style, and scared the other little girl right away.  This tournament only allows a 7-point spread before they invoke the "mercy rule" to keep kids from getting too beat up.  The mercy rule was invoked when the score was 8 to 1.  Basia was ready for the finals.  Basia really surprised me in the second match because she slowed down, avoided the other girl's kicks with fancy footwork and then kicked each time she saw an opening, scoring every time.  Before the first round was over, they again invoked the mercy rule, with Basia ahead 8 to 1.  She barely got kicked, so she was feeling good.  It was cute to see that she was surprised when they did the awards ceremony and she got first place.  I guess she didn't realize that completely wiping out the competition was enough for the gold.