One for the sparrers!
Olympian Safwan Khalil and Olympic Coach Ali Khalil are running a session Saturday 16th at 7pm.

They have run these sessions across every state in Australia over the last couple of weeks and now it's NSW's turn!

Please book via the membership app for the Zoom details.

In the last update we forgot to congratulate Roman for passing his grading to yellow belt. Sorry, congrats Roman!

The Prime Minister unveiled the plan to "get back to normal" last week. I think they're already back pedalling in how "normal" it'll be.

The news is that we expect to be allowed to open during "phase 2". NSW is a week behind the other states in opening up phase 1.

Phase 2 looks to be approx 1 month away.

As hinted last week, it will not be back to normal.
Still scarce details but at a minimum there will be restricted class numbers (between 10 and 20, still unconfirmed) and social distancing must still apply.
Our expectation of going back to mid March style socially distant training seems about right.

As we go back to in person classes the following are important to remember:

• If joining in person, you MUST book via the member site. Penalties will apply for reserving a spot and not showing up.
• We will have to turn people away if the class is full. You'll know if it's full if everyone books via the member site.
• Stay home if you're sick
• We will run online classes simultaneously.
• If you are in class you may accidentally end up on the broadcast.
• Timetable is likely to have even more classes especially if the attendance limit is 10 people per class (this includes instructors)
• We've got to be cautious of second waves. South Korea and Germany added to the list of Hong Kong and Singapore.

After getting trying a plank challenge for a number of weeks (2 of them can hold plank for over 9 minutes!) CEO Sam Zheng decided to do something different so he put it to the team and they were up for the challenge.

Over the next 10 weeks they will be learning taekwondo basics and some techniques to help them during the course of their lives. 

CuriousThing is an innovative Australian start up which automates the phone interview process then uses natural language processing (text analysis), knowledge graph and deep transfer learning to provide individual and cohort analysis. 

Curious Thing’s mission is to empower companies to go beyond resumes, and make 6 billion good and fair decisions.

Australian Taekwondo has grouped together with a range of other sports bodies and is lobbying the Government to allow dojangs to open. 

Some of our school halls (e.g. Manly Village Public School) have already cancelled term 2 for community users like us. But the mood is more positive and there are hints of lock down being lifted. So if we can open it is likely to be a phased opening.

We are conscious that being able to open isn't going to be a free for all. 
The virus is still out there and there is still no treatment or vaccine.

Being able to open again is likely to bring us back to mid-Feb/early March where some students will still prefer to stay home and we will have to implement restricted, no contact and limited capacity training in person. At this stage we will also continue to run the online classes.

We will need to hear what the restrictions are before we have final plans in place.
Things like hand sanitiser and limiting class capacity are manageable.
Other potential items like cleaning the dojang every x hours are not so manageable (it takes me about an hour to vacuum and wash the mats and another 2 hours for them to dry).