Taekwondo testing kicks off in Lone Tree

By Christopher Borro
Posted 2/3/21

Alone or in pairs, the students walked across the basketball court to their instructors. They bowed, and repeated their forms, jabbing and kicking and twirling all the while. Their mantras came …

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Taekwondo testing kicks off in Lone Tree

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Alone or in pairs, the students walked across the basketball court to their instructors. They bowed, and repeated their forms, jabbing and kicking and twirling all the while. Their mantras came steadily: Integrity, respect, listening, hard work. They were, as they put it, taekwondo kids.

“A lot of people probably think martial arts is about the fighting… but it’s more than that,” instructor Curtis Long said. “It’s the discipline. It’s the life skills.”

Saturday was their first day of testing in groups. The younger ‘Tiny Tiger’ group, three young boys ages 4-7, went first. The next group had ten students, both boys and girls, ages 8 and above. The kids had been practicing under the tutelage of Long, a fourth-degree black belt, since October.

Long specializes in songahm taekwondo, which he describes as “a more traditional style.” There are nine colors of belt, from white to red, and then nine additional degrees of black belts. Most of the students at the testing sessions were aiming to advance from white to orange.

While this introductory testing period was four months, future belt advancement should be conducted on a regular three-month schedule.

“This is not a style that gives you the next rank just because you show up,” Long said. “There’s a lot of hard work involved.”

All four of Long’s children have experience in taekwondo. His youngest son, Carter, is a first-degree black belt and serves as an instructor trainee for the Lone Tree groups. Long oftentimes practiced alongside his children.

“I started with my 21-year-old when he was five,” he said. “My instructor at the time knew I had done a couple years of a different style, way back in college. So, he said to me, ‘You’re here anyways. Why don’t you do the classes with [your son?]’”

While the family lives in Coralville, trips to the wellness center with his wife sparked Long to create this American Taekwondo Association-certified club.

“[Long] and his wife do personal training…and they approached us about some classes. He said, ‘I’d like to get this started’ and we were totally on board,” wellness center coordinator Carmen Donovan said.

Long saw an opportunity to advance the sport in the community. He said Lone Tree is “a great little town with a lot of families who want their kids doing things, but there wasn’t a lot of [martial arts] for these kids to do.”

And so, he created a place for them to learn martial arts. Starting with these classes, as students advance in both skill and age, he’s going to create an advanced class for them to continue learning.

Technically, there is no upper age limit for the classes, as Long’s own experience attests. As he joined his kids’ lessons, so too can parents learn taekwondo with their own kids.

“When I first started, I was five, so it was a little hard differentiating instructor from dad,” Carter Long, 14, said of his earliest taekwondo practices with his father.

But Long has been able to be both, first to his own children, and now to another generation of taekwondo kids.

“That’s the beauty of martial arts, and taekwondo in particular,” Long said. “There’s always something to learn.”