Happy Christmas – Year in Review
As we wish all our members and friends a very Happy Christmas we reflect on the amazing inclusive judo year we have shared together promoting and developing inclusion in judo worldwide.
The SNJU continues to be a progressive force in the development of worldwide SN/Adaptive judo. 2019 saw our membership grow to an all time high with many new countries and federations becoming members of the fastest growing SN/Adaptive judo organization in the world.
In the past eleven months we have achieved and surpassed some of our goals and ambitions for adaptive judo and look forward to the joys and challenges of 2020.
2019 started off with our own board meeting in Switzerland at which we laid out our ambitious plans for the year ahead. These plans included more development courses, more competitive opportunities, more personal development and more unity amongst countries with SN judo programs. This we not only spoke about and planned – but also achieved!
Competition Opportunities: This year we staged and supported the European Open SN Games in Sweden, the World SN Games in The Netherlands and the Swiss Open SN Championships in Switzerland. In additional our team was the lead support team for the Special Olympic World Games in Abu Dhabi. Individually each of our team members supported and organized inclusion events in their respective counties and helped many more in other countries.
Development courses: Our online SN referee course continues to attract interested parties and has resulted in an international register of developing SN referee across the world. We continue to host workshops and seminars at all our supported events and this year we added some additional seminars of interest including therapy/disability assisted dogs programmes, SN tournament preparation, SN & unified kata to name but a few.
In Switzerland this year we staged the first two day Coaching & Competition Seminar and workshops. A large number of our members clubs/countries took part in this incredible two day course which covered adaptive coaching, play & contest rules, disability awareness seminars, Judo games workshops and much more.. The event was run under the aspics of Special Olympics Switzerland, Swiss Judo Federation and run by SNJU directors James Mulroy and Cilia Evenblij.
Unity and Inclusion: The SNJU has been working very hard to bring together as many SN judo organizations, clubs and federations for the single purpose of raising awareness and further developing adaptive/SN/inclusive judo worldwide. Early this year we had the ideal opportunity to do just that. For the very first time in judo history SN judo was invited to take part in the annual EJU Judo festival in Croatia. The SNJU were instrumental in delivering seminars, workshops and advice to a number of large interested audiences.
Other amazing firsts was the inclusion of a number of teams who wowed the audience at this year’s EJU Kata Championships with demonstrations of adapted and unified kata. This we see as a major step forward in EJU thinking and policy and could possibly open the door to further development in this area of our sport.
In other News: The board of the SNJU are delighted and excited to be the major contributors to the EU funded “Autjudo” Erasmus + programme. Funding was secured and the research program will run for the next three years across six European countries.
We approach 2020 with the same enthusiasm and drive as 2019 and aim to keep moving forward. In 2020 we will be launching the long awaited online coaching course, this will go live in early January. Supported competitive events will include the World SN Games in Netherlands in April, the Swiss SN Open in June and the European Open SN Games in Ireland in October.
In addition we will be staging a number of seminars and workshops again next year at the EJU Judo Festival in Croatia.
For now we would like to wish the whole judo world and very Happy Christmas and look forward to seeing as many of you as possible in 2020.
SNJU Team Tomas, James, Tycho, Cilia, Bob