People who know me well know that I like my stats. In fact some friends call me the“stat man”. For example, if we are talking football, I like to know how many games Frank Lampard has played for Chelsea and how many goals he has scored. I also like to know how many of these goals were scored in open play and how many were scored from a penalty or free kick etc. I’ll then cross check his stats with those of Didier Drogba etc. In my current job as a Treasury Analyst I get paid to create spread sheets full of stats with lots of different graphs etc. So why am I telling you this? Well recently Blogger.com has added a “stats” section for the blog owners to be able to see how many hits they get on their blog on a daily/weekly/monthly or “all time” basis and it also tells me which post gets the most hits. What’s interesting on this, a Judo blog, is that the post that has gotten more hits than any other is in fact my first post on Nova Forca BJJ in Epsom. I first went there to try out BJJ two years ago and trained there for a whole summer whilst DJC was closed. This post has gotten twice as many hits as my next most popular post which was called “Judo tips and tricks”. Of the top ten most read posts on my blog 3 of them have BJJ in the title and 2 more are related to MMA.
So what does all this information tell me? The way I read it is that there are probably a lot of people who are looking for BJJ or MMA in my area and when they do a Google search for BJJ in Dorking or MMA in Dorking, my blog pops up. It would be nice if these people then thought that Judo was a viable alternative to BJJ but I’ve talked about the reasons that this doesn’t tend to happen before but maybe the Olympics will change some people’s perceptions of Judo.
I think one problem a lot of judo clubs have/create is they don't actually have that many sessions on their timetable. Most BJJ/MMA clubs have several sessions a week (you mentioned Nova Forca and a quick look at their timetable shows 5 BJJ and 2 MMA classes every week) so if people can't make a certain session they can always go to another.
ReplyDeleteA quick look at the Dorking JC timetable shows 1 adult class on a tuesday and if people have other commitments that happen to fall on a tuesday that's one less person doing judo.
I know the counter argument is that if you can't fill up 1 session then it's not worth adding more but having 2 sessions a week gives more flexibility to the timetable and obviously would mean extra training which would also benifit the existing students.
Whilst I agree with your comments most BJJ & MMA clubs are run as full time businesses with full time instructors whereas most Judo Clubs are not. The coaches at Dorking Judo club, to my knowledge, do not take any money out of it and basically teach for free and for the love of Judo. Whilst this means Judoka looking to train more than once a week often have to seek out other clubs it does mean that the mat fees are considerably cheaper than BJJ.
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