Finding Martial Art Tournaments

Help Search Sport Karate Locations, Competitions, or Circuits

Oct 4, 2008

Search engines turned up nothing favorable when searching for tournaments? This guide can help make the process easier.

Looking for competitive martial arts involves searching for tournaments or events that are often advertised poorly. Many sources on the internet give you information on a single tournament, or have very incomplete listings. Tournaments themselves are usually an advertising ground for instructors who attend them, but one has to be in the “tournament scene” already to have access to the table full of flyers that inevitably graces most competitions. Newspapers will sometimes advertise tournaments, but usually ads circulate a week or two before the competition happens.

Many martial art schools get flyers and sign-up forms from other instructors in the area. But if your particular school doesn’t promote tournament attendance, it becomes even more difficult to find tournament information. This article was written primarily for those people, and the following are tools a person has at their expense.

Direct Contact

Possibly the best way to do independent research is to simply call or email instructors, karate clubs, gyms, or even retail stores. Instructors of schools, especially “sportier” types of martial arts (Wushu, TKD, Judo, etc.), often know of several events in their area. Clubs and gyms have groups of people that will attend tournaments together, and there’s almost always someone in charge of organizing events.

Retail stores of martial art merchandise are many times given flyers for the tournament goers that shop at their stores. It is oftentimes true that people working in these stores are into competitive karate, or at least talk to enough people that come in that they’re aware of upcoming events.

For a decent list of schools that can be contacted, look here. Larger newspapers or phone books will also advertise schools in the area (the same can be said for martial arts retailers)

Circuits

Less of a “tool” and more of a piece of the competitive scene, circuits are a series of tournaments that happen over a period of time, usually a year, that allow people to accumulate points for performing in a large number of tournaments represented by that circuit. These can be comparable to leagues in major sports. Signing up for or attending these specific tournaments a circuit guarantees knowledge of several events at a time. www.sportmartialarts.com has a very large list of circuits available to those interested, and can be found here.

Websites

Tons of websites make claims such as “Top Martial Art Tournament Listings Here!”, then when you click on a state or a link, a list no longer than five tournaments appear, and two of them could have already happened by the time you enter the search. This is a problem that arises for two reasons:

To date, this is probably the weakest way to search for tournaments. Some of the following websites manage to regularly update their sites, and have forums available for asking for additional help.

Forums should never be discounted as a good place to find tournaments. They’re thick with people from all over who keep up to date on tournaments that are happening in their area. Depending on whether you live in the United States or elsewhere (and how far you’re willing to travel), it may be advantageous to search for martial art forums in your region.

The copyright of the article Finding Martial Art Tournaments in Martial Arts is owned by Jeremy Jusek. Permission to republish Finding Martial Art Tournaments in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.