7th Degree Black Belt – Kyoshi
David Everett is a Nashville native with no desire to see that change. He was always very small for his age and a great target for any bully that came along. He remembers getting into a scuffle as a child and going to the book shelf in their den, and grabbing the World Book Encyclopedia Volume J-K, and reading everything there was about Judo. With his little sister remaining so much less than cooperative as a practice dummy, his interest soon faded.
His next exposure came at the age of 13, when he signed up for Kung Fu classes through Metros’ Adult Education program. There were around 200 first time students the first night (thanks to the popularity of the very successful, new TV show, Kung Fu), in the gym at McMurry Jr. High School, and one Chinese instructor, who spoke next to no English. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy it, he just didn’t understand what he was doing. he did outlast most, but after two semesters, he realized this was not going to be his path to becoming the next Kwai Chang Caine.
In 1980, at the age of 20, a friend talked Mr. Everett into signing up for karate classes under Sensei Wayne Tyler. He knew immediately that Wado, under his instruction, was right for him. He even came to understand, finally, what he had been doing in the Kung Fu class. Right after receiving his Brown Belt, in 1982, he started teaching Tyler Sensei’s beginner classes, and a couple of months later he started helping teach the children’s classes as well, and continued teaching these classes until late 1987.
He enjoys competition very much, and was very active competing in around a 100 tournaments, from 1980 through 1986, regularly placing in, weapons forms, empty-hand forms, and fighting divisions. In more recent years, he has continued to compete on occasion, when opportunity allows, continuing to, usually, win his three divisions, and leading a DDKS team to win the coveted team trophy, at the USEWF tournament.
He received his black belt in 1986, and his seventh degree in March of 2012. Teaching for DDKS since the fall of 1993, he has taught at all of the DDKS schools, (with the exception of the Lebanon school), with a 10-year break while he pursued his own entrepreneurial interests, and now enjoys being back at his home school, training with Tyler Shihan and a very strong group of black belts, and teaching some very promising under belts.
