Tyrese Roberts won two medals to lead the Shotokan Karate-do In­ter­na­tion­al Fed­er­a­tion Kanaza­wa Group T&T (SKIF KG TT) team to five medals at the 10th SKIF Con­ti­nen­tal Cham­pi­onships in Queré­taro, Mex­i­co.

In the com­pe­ti­tion, held from Ju­ly 31 - Au­gust 4, T&T field­ed a team of 17 ath­letes based out of the La Joya and Barataria do­jos, in­clud­ing age groups as low as the 12-13 di­vi­sion, up to the 40-plus cat­e­go­ry.

On the tata­mi (mats), the com­peti­tors came away with three bronze and two sil­ver medals in both ka­ta (forms) and ku­mite (spar­ring) di­vi­sions.

Most no­table among ath­letes who placed in ka­ta, were Roberts and Gabriel Sam­my, who both had to con­tend with mul­ti­ple tie breaks to seize their re­spec­tive bronze medals in the boys’ 18-20 di­vi­sion and boys’ 14-15 black­belt cat­e­go­ry, re­spec­tive­ly. Sam­my had to do one tie-break­ing round, while Roberts had three.

Sam­my’s sec­ond ren­di­tion of Jion, a pop­u­lar black belt grade ka­ta at In­ter­na­tion­al tour­na­ments, was enough to win the tiebreak for third, while Roberts left noth­ing on the floor with his ath­let­ic per­for­mance of Kanku Sho, a ka­ta that fea­tures leap­ing and oth­er eva­sive tech­niques.

“I’m very pleased that the team went out there and put their best foot for­ward,” club di­rec­tor Ian Sam­my added af­ter the tour­na­ment. “They were a green team but re­al­ly buck­led down and got fo­cused com­ing down to the last few days be­fore the event. They man­aged their chal­lenges on the floor very well al­so too.”

The team al­so fea­tured a medal from Solange Khan who was a no­table per­former in the women’s 40 and up brown belt di­vi­sion, where she pow­ered her way through to a sil­ver medal fin­ish af­ter con­tend­ing one tie break that took her in­to an­oth­er round. Khan, a par­ent at the club whose daugh­ter is al­so a brown belt, start­ed karate with the club’s on­line ses­sions dur­ing the pan­dem­ic and is well on her way to tran­si­tion­ing to black belt. Her daugh­ter Is­abel­la, fea­tured in the girls’ 12-13 brown belt di­vi­sion, but just missed out on the medals.

Meli­na De­four, how­ev­er, high­light­ed the fight­ing spir­it of the team. The black belt, who is a doc­tor and a re­cent med­ical school grad­u­ate, rose to the chal­lenge in a stacked women’s black belt ka­ta di­vi­sion, ad­vanc­ing through the rounds de­spite a foot in­jury and was in touch­ing dis­tance of a place on the podi­um.

Char­l­ize Find­ley al­so grabbed a bronze in the girls’ 18-20 di­vi­sion, while Roberts part­nered with Re­bec­ca Mo­hammed, and won sil­ver in the yaku­soku ku­mite di­vi­sion, a spar­ring con­test which en­tailed teams com­pet­ing us­ing pre-arranged spar­ring tech­niques.

The com­pe­ti­tion was a sig­nif­i­cant step for­ward for the club as not on­ly a suc­cess­ful medal re­turn but al­so re­in­forc­ing ties with the SKIF Latin Amer­i­can re­gion, which start­ed as far back as 2015.

“I’m ex­pect­ing bet­ter things from them lat­er on as we con­tin­ue to pre­pare for the next event we have card­ed. We’re talk­ing about (the World Cham­pi­onships in) Turkey in 2025, and the same team will be train­ing for Paraguay, where the next SKIF Pan Amer­i­can Cham­pi­onships will be held,” said the club di­rec­tor.

The SKIF KG TT club has branch­es in Mal­abar, Mt Lam­bert, Barataria and La Joya, where the head­quar­ters are lo­cat­ed, which forms the lo­cal branch of SKIF, a karate fed­er­a­tion with more than 130 coun­tries un­der their um­brel­la.

Ho­n­our roll

Sil­ver

Solange Khan

Tyrese Roberts/Re­bec­ca Mo­hammed

Bronze

Gabriel Sam­my

Tyrese Roberts

Char­l­ize Find­ley