Coty Coghill

First Degree Black Belt.

Coty Coghill
First Degree Black belt

Like most 14 year old’s with no extracur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties, I was sucked into the TV and video games.

One night, while in the mid­dle of another video game, my Dad asked if I wanted to check out the Karate school down the road. Being the lazy teenager, I didn’t want to go. But my Dad didn’t give me much of a choice. And he was right. I NEEDED to pick up some activ­ity — whether it was a sport or cro­chet­ing — I needed to do some­thing.

I remem­ber it was Wednes­day night — spar­ring night – when we arrived at the school and I got to watch the Adult Karate Class Spar. Although I didn’t fully under­stand was going on, it looked interesting.

Then, a girl who worked the front desk asked me if I was inter­ested in join­ing the karate class. And with a sin­gle word, my jour­ney began.

As a socially awk­ward teenager who barely spoke a word to any­one about any­thing, being thrown into a class, sur­rounded by tons of peo­ple I didn’t know, doing some­thing I had no clue how to do, It was extremely nerve rack­ing and it tested every ounce of try in my body.

But with all the help and guid­ance from Sen­sei Tyler and Mr. Tate, I made it through the most impor­tant and best 4–1/2 years of my life.

Through karate, I’ve learned so much about who I am as a per­son. I’ve learned I can over­come any obsta­cle and that I have more self-confidence than I knew I had.

Now, as a Black Belt, I teach karate to kids at ele­men­tary schools hop­ing to influ­ence at least one to take the same amaz­ing jour­ney I’ve gone through.

Every­one at Deaton Karate treats me like fam­ily and I’m also blessed to have such a lov­ing and sup­port­ing fam­ily at home. And the friends I’ve made here are irre­place­able — you will never make such a strong bond with such an amaz­ing group of people.

All in all, it is hard to come up with words to sum up Karate, this Dojo, and the peo­ple in it. I just know I want to stay involved in Karate for the rest of my life.

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