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Hello,
Unfortunately the Bartley Green Dojo will be closed on Wednesday 28th January 2015 due to exams taking place at the school. All other classes are running as normal. We are sorry for any inconvenience this will cause.
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Welcome to the new Birmingham & Halesowen Shotokan Karate Club website. This has been a long time in the making with the initial work starting early last year initially with the help of Yvonne before she had to move and brief small sections of activity going on throughout the year which gave the basic framework and theme. The final push was over the Christmas break to finalize the details and preserve the content from the old site which people may still find interesting.
Why a new site, there are many reasons some technical, some related to problems with our previous site host which have resulted in lots of extra work behind the scenes. The main benefits for you as users of the site will be a much more modern experience. Nowadays many of us access the site from multiple devices from mobile phones and tablets to computers with large monitors. Limitations in our old sites software meant that the site didn’t fare well when accessed on some form factors or with certain browsers. The new site should hopefully address this issue providing a better experience whichever way you choose to access it. It also provides the potential opportunity for comments to be posted for some articles on the site making it a much more interactive experience.
This site has been tested under Windows 7 using the current versions of Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer at the time of writing and on a Android Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone and Google Nexus 7 tablet using Dolphin Browser, Firefox for Android and Chrome.
I would be interested to here what your thoughts are on the new site, so please feel free to comment.
Thanks,
Richard, Web & Social Media Administrator
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Rainbow Palace
168 Stourbridge Rd
Stourbridge
DY9 7BU
A pleaseant night was had by all at this years Christmas meal at the new venue of the Rainbow Palace. The food was great and extremely good value and the proprietor remembered Shihan Cummins from years past when the club held functions their as was friendly and joking all night. Below are a few pictures from the night.
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2014 is a very special year, as Shihan Cummins celebrates 50 years, half a century, of training. Shihan Cummins started karate in 1964, when it was virtually unheard of and unknown. Now, after all these years he has trained thousands of people around the world, many of whom have gone on to become black belts, many of whom have become regional, national, international and even world champions.
Fifty years on, Shihan Cummins has been awarded the rank of 8th Dan in recognition of his lifetime contribution to fostering and developing the art of Shotokan karate-do. Truly one of the pioneers of karate, he is one of a very select band of individuals who helped shape the standard of karate in the United Kingdom to be one of the very best in the world.
We wish Shihan Cummins our sincere congratulations and we look forward to training with him, as he gives the same passion and effort and energy to every class as he has done over all these years.
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As most of you know Sensei Cummins bestowed the title of Sensei to the club Sempai Austin Birks 4th dan so that upon receiving instructions from Sensei Birks during a class as the senior student the correct response would now be “Osu Sensei” instead of “Osu Sempai”. This has led to some confusion during classes where students where receiving instructions from both Sensei Cummins and Sensei Birks. Therefore as Sensei Cummins has recently been awarded the rank of 8th dan it has been decided amongst the senior students that the honorific title “Shihan” should be used when responding to instructions from Sensei Cummins to avoid confusion therefore when receiving or responding to Sensei Cummins please use “Osu Shihan”.
Shihan is an honorific title used in many martial arts as is usually bestowed upon senior dan grade black belts although unlike titles such as Renshi (4th or 5th dan), Kyoshi (6th or 7th dan) or Hanshi (8th dan and above) is not related to grade but is used as a sign of respect. It is usually informally translated in English as “Master” but literally translates as simply “To be a model” / “Instructor”.
