This month, Karate BC would like to profile Castlegar Karate Club. Thank you for being a member of Karate BC!
1St Head Sensei: Mr. Tim Dunlap (6th Dan)
Current Head Sensei: Maurice Doucet (5th Dan)
Year Club was founded: 1985 by Sensei Tim Dunlap
Year joined Karate BC: 1987
Number of Members: 25
Style Association: Seihoku Shotokan Canada (SSC)
Castlegar Karate Club is a traditional Shotokan karate club nestled in the Columbia River valley of the West Kootenays. The Seihoku Shotokan Canada Karate Organization (originally known as Seihoku-Ryu Karate), was formed in 1967 under Sensei Robey Reed (7th Dan and 8th Dan in Judo). Sensei Reed is a retired Airforce Veteran from the United States who spent many years in Japan and had the unique opportunity to train directly with Funikoshi, the founder of Shotokan Karate, and then Nakayama who was Funikoshi’s successor.
Seihoku means north-west and as such, Seihoku Shotokan Canada has three clubs in the north-west including Airdrie and Smokey River in Alberta and of course Castlegar in BC. SSC prides itself on the quality of its members, standards and instruction and is age inclusive with members ranging from 5 to 69 years old. Because of the small class size, members have the opportunity not only to develop martial arts skills, training and knowledge, but also have opportunities to develop teaching, organizational and leadership skills.
Every spring, Castlegar Karate Club hosts the Spring Seminar where many SSC karate-ka come together to train and ensure standards are kept consistent. At these seminars other martial arts practitioners from the Kootenays are invited to join and share knowledge.
SSC places strong emphasis on learning the traditional Shotokan karate basics. The Castlegar Karate Club holds true to these values but classes also reflect Sensei Maurice Doucet’s history in martial arts. Sensei Doucet was first introduced to martial arts through kick-boxing and joined his first karate club when Sensei Ken Corrigan was living in Trail, BC. Since then, Sensei Doucet has studied Aikido and Iaido and incorporates these disciplines into training sessions. Sensei Doucet has particular interest in modernizing the self-defence curriculum in the SSC association to include takedowns and ground game strategies that are becoming more common due to the popularity of UFC.
The Castlegar Karate Club is also active in the community. For the past 20 years, the club has donated all profits to Selkirk College who distributed the funds as a bursary awarded to an outstanding student in financial need.
