STA Selection Tournament

Yesterday STA held its Victorian State Comp and directly afterwards the next Olympic Qualification Tournament. Unfortunately the senior Vics had to be canceled due to lack of entries but I imagine slowly but surely this will change as STA now has full support of the Australian Olympic Committee as well as the WTF.

Running only two courts at the State Netball Hockey Center the atmosphere was quit subdued, there wasn't many spectators or many athletes warming up. The evening had the same feeling as the selections comp at the Gold Coast. Calm, quite and almost empty. For such a large stadium there may have been 50 spectators who for the most part sat quietly waiting.

It was meant to start at three but as usual when does any Taekwondo competition run on time. When they finally got started at around 4.30 the matches were drawn out as is the case with the electronic scoring system. Before each fight the Daedo representative puts the relevant receiver into the chest guard so the score is immediately transferred to the display. Competitors each do a test kick to confirm the scoring system is working and then the match can begin.

The days of a match running a fixed 8 minutes (3 x 2 minute rounds, 1 minute break) are gone as technical difficulties with the new scoring system and video replay can draw out a fight by up to 15 minutes. A coach can contest a decision if he feels the corner referees missed a score to the head or a refereeing decision was incorrect. You are not meant to contest a body shot and this will generally result in a loss of your card as the electronic system is there to remove human error. But what tends to happen on turning kicks is only one point registers from the kick then the referees must manually put on the second point. If they miss this you can generally hear the crowd and the coach saying something until it gets corrected.

Coaches can continue to challenge decisions until they are incorrect, were then they will lose the right to challenge further in that match for that particular player. Each player gets a total of two false challenge decisions to contest in the tournament were afterwards they lose that right all together. This is to prevent abuse of this system by a coach and player to perhaps interrupt the flow of the match to their benefit.

Their was around 50 competitors in total and of that not all competed as they walk on then off again to gain points by just attending. Some were carrying injuries and their was two that I know of that were uncontested.

I went along to watch and support the Victorians and keep an eye on my division. Tom (-58) won his first easily then his opponent withdrew as was the case with Marcus (-80).
Cems division was probably the highlight of the night as the three players were so evenly matched. Cem, Daniel and Terrence all fought and won one match each leaving themselves tied on points so the organizers elected to have them all fight each other again for one round. Naturally the intensity was higher right from the beginning and at the end of it all Cem come out on top. Congratulations mate.