Karate: onward and upward

[pegkerr]

Both girls have decided to commit to the next karate contract, which is at least a two year commitment, and can be as long as five. It sucks that we have to come up with another chunk of money for the downpayment on the contract, but I'm thrilled that they're making this commitment. They are going to be just amazing athletes by the time they graduate from high school.

It also means that Rob and I are committing to an awful lot of hours cleaning the dojo. But I actually don't mind. It's kind of nice--a meditative time. I shall be the queen of mops.

Comments

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Wow, I hadn't thought about that. I guess the contractual stuff is good for commitment. Our TKD place is month-to-month. Even at that we have trouble getting enough students.

I don't think the place takes more than 20 minutes a week to keep clean. There's only about 100 square feet that aren't on the mat, and the mat just needs a quick sweep once every couple of days.

Don't get me wrong, I wish the place was so busy we had problems like keeping it clean. We're running several hundred bucks in the red on rent every month; we're only there because the strip mall is 1/2 empty and the owner agreed that we don't cause any trouble, we increase the traffic to the other stores, and some income is better than none.

We're so low on students right now that the Master is not pressuring parents who haven't paid a dime in months, because I guess he figures having students there is better than not, and some of the non-payers have friends in the school who are paying. It's a tough situation.

The only real silver lining is that if you show up to 2nd class, you can get pretty much one-on-one training.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I should point out that this has really come to a head in the last year or so since the economy completely tanked here in the motor city support region. There are a lot of people scraping around here.