In some ways, Taekwondo, the Korean martial art form now being offered as a club sport, resembles the other sports offered at McCallum. There is competition and winning and losing.
Freshman Marlena Taylor-Adair knows all about the winning part.
At a taekwondo tournament at the Delco Center on Feb. 4, Taylor-Adair won a grand championship medal for forms, a gold medal in forms and a silver medal in sparring. Fellow McCallum student Liam Hannon won a bronze in forms.
When we caught up with her, however, Taylor-Adair said that for her, the sport was less about the awards and more about the daily discipline it takes to master the art of it.
“The most important thing is not about the sport,” Taylor-Adair said. “It’s about respecting your instructors, saying, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and ‘No ma’am,’ or ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir’ because they get very touchy about that, and it’s also really difficult but it’s a lot of fun.”
She also likes that there are many different events all rolled up into one sport. There’s sparring, which is fighting, and also forms that students try to perfect. During practices, they do stretches, push-ups, crunches and other general strength exercises; they use ladders to do drills, and they do self defense sometimes. Their practices aren’t at school.
The sports is being offered on campus as a varsity club sport, but Marlena-Adair was drawn to the sport before it came to campus.
“I was interested in Taekwondo because I like martial arts,” Marlena-Adair said. “My friend’s dad taught taekwondo; it was nice to have people I knew, and they were already doing it so I started.”
While winning the grand championship was nice, she downplayed its significance.
“It was a grand championship for my belt level and my age in one competition,” Marlena-Adair said. “It was nice, and I was happy I guess, but I wasn’t especially excited for anything. I was also nervous because I had another competition after that.”
She plans to continue in the sport for the next three years of high school, in part because there’s scholarships for taekwondo, and she hopes to get better so can earn one.
She’s unsure of what college she wants to go to, but she doesn’t want to be too far from Austin. Her short list at the moment includes the University of Texas, Rice University in Houston, and Trinity University in San Antonio.
