I hope that everyone had a lovely weekend, and for those that were able, yesterday’s celebration for Mother’s Day was made a little easier with the relaxation of the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions.
With the Federal and State government announcements on Friday, we now have a road map for the easing of restrictions. In approximately four week increments, all going well, we ought to be returning to something more approximating normal over the next few months.
Of course, these developments do bend our attentions to when we as a Club may be able to return to our usual training. The relevant category for our activities is community sport, with a sub category of non-contact or contact. The Australian Institute of Sports has put out parallel guidelines based around Olympic sports to set out what type of training can be done in those sports at each of the three staged outlined. While the current spread of disciplines we support does not strictly match the AIS list, there are sufficient overlaps to guide us regarding what we can do.
Specifically, any discipline that involves bodily contact, including Jujutsu, Kendo and Systema cannot be back to usual programming until we hit Stage 3 of the roadmap. This places us into July at the earliest before we can go back to regular training in those spaces. Taiko, Iaido, FlexiFit, and (possibly) ZKR Jodo could technically return to regular training in Stage 2 (mid June), but we have to be mindful of potential hiccups to that timeline if there is a further spike in cases over coming weeks as restrictions recede.
We will be discussing our return to training plans at this weekend’s Executive meeting, and will be able to flesh out our planned return more fully in next week’s Budo Bulletin. Personally, I am still keen to offer online participation in some of our key disciplines via a “virtual dojo” set up once we go back fully. It had been great to see old friends return regularly to classes, and I certainly want to be able to continue that.
Have a great week everyone. Hope to see you over the video link in our various sessions and I’m eager for each step we take closer to restarting our classes.