Chennai: We have seen some sport professionals or practitioners of martial art venture into coaching only when they retire as that is usually the basic norm. But, doing the unusual are two young lads in their early twenties, who have taken up taekwondo coaching and are successfully running a centre in Alwarpet.
Nithin Kumar (23) and S Kartikeyan (24), learnt taekwondo right from their childhood and are still at the prime of their careers but decided to groom talents into the martial art. They are coaching more than 50 students in their centre, The Taekwon Dojang, located in Sriram Nagar, Alwarpet.
Speaking about when and why they decided to teach taekwondo, Kartikeyan and Nithin Kumar says, ”Right from our childhood, we were learning taekwondo and by 2012 we were training under Master Young Geun Yang from Korea who was training students at InKo Centre here. He had this dream of setting up a taekwondo institute in Chennai, so he started this centre in the year 2015. But unfortunately he was not able to stay here due to personal reasons and in the year 2017, it was Kartikeyan who took it over from him.”
Nithin joined him to teach the students only in the year 2018 and he says that their dream is to make it the best place to learn the martial art. Speaking about his inception into martial arts, Kartikeyan says, ”Right from my childhood I had been into martial arts. I first started with Judo, then learnt boxing and Silambam only after that I started learning taekwondo and soon I realised that this is what I wanted to do and I have been teaching the martial art since 2015. Now I am a full-time instructor.”
On what made them take up coaching, Nithin says, ”It is absolute passion and taekwondo has been a part of our life for more than a decade. We enjoyed practising the martial art and when we got the opportunity to spread whatever we have learnt, we were more excited to share it with others.”
“We have divided the classes into beginners, advanced and seniors. We teach fitness, self-defence, sparring and also basic forms of taekwondo so that the children here learn every aspect associated with taekwondo. We also want the students to make sure that they feel at home when they are here so we have four days of classes every week and each day is divided for Poomsae, which is a basics class, fitness, self-defence and sparring which is to prepare them for competitions. On Fridays and Saturdays we have free-time where the students can come here and do anything they want. We also have separate classes for the parents and adults with a separate batch from 7.30 pm to 8.30 pm on Fridays and Saturdays,” said, Nithin when asked about their their teaching style.
The students of the Taekwon Dojang are also active participants of tournaments and have recently won the national tournament in Gujarat. They are going to compete in School Games Federation of India tournament in the nationals. Kartikeyan and Nithin also participate in the tournaments and win medals.
On how they manage between teaching the students as well as prepare themselves for tournaments, Kartikeyan says, ’We just prepare during the free time that we have on Saturdays but since we are into teaching we dont get to train much. But our aim is to prepare our students and we would be happy if our students go on and represent the nation they say in unison.’ Contact instructor Karthikeyan at 9790422151