Going overseas twice today.

Let's get started.

Sir.

I will live with perseverance in the spirit of Taekwondo, courtesy for fellow students, integrity within myself, and to become a black belt leader.

Welcome to the Ata Nation podcast.

Welcome back, Ata Nation.

This is episode 147 of the Ata Nation podcast.

It is a pleasure to be back with you today.

We have two great guests on today.

I decided, I did one of these interviews at spring nationals and I decided, like, how great would it be to have an international athlete of the week as well as an international ATA school owner.

So we've got them both today on episode 147 of the At Nation podcast.

Make sure you hit the subscribe button.

Over to YouTube.

Hit the subscribe button on the ATA's YouTube page.

Go to your podcast player, hit the subscribe button.

We want all of ATA Nation to hear what we've got going on and wait till the end.

I'll tell you something super awesome.

Let's get to our special guests.

Special guest interview.

ATA Nation.

We have another awesome athlete from across the globe in ATA Nation.

Ma'am, can you introduce yourself and tell us where you're from?

Yeah, Atanation.

I'm Liba Fejeda from Brazil and I train at ATA plant system in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Fantastic.

And what rank are you, ma'am?

I am a first degree black belt.

First degree black belt.

Congratulations.

And how did you get started in martial arts?

So my mom is a black belle from Hapkido and I usually see her as an example for me.

So when I was nine years old, she introduced me to taekwondo.

So.

And it was like first love my.

I love it.

So I started to practice since I was 9 years old.

That's fantastic.

I love that.

And you got introduced to martial arts from your mom.

That's super cool.

What is your.

What's your favorite part of training in martial arts?

Martial arts connect people.

So when you train a martial arts, you can talk to other people.

Your skills, your life, you can teach them new kicks, punch.

So you can talk to each other.

What do you train in your type of martial art?

I love that.

That's great.

Yeah.

So you guys down in Brazil are gonna have the Pan Am championships this year.

What do you.

When you go to tournaments and when you do tournaments, what's your favorite thing to do at a tournament?

I have lots of friends around the world and for me this is really cool because in panam championships we chat to each other and I can speak in other languages, so.

And I.

And we can chat to each Other and teach to other people new skills that we can improve in our traditional forms.

Sparring.

So for me, this type of thing, internees are very important.

I love that.

It's all about, you know, getting to hang out with friends, train with each other, do all that fun stuff together.

Are you.

When you compete is like sparring your favorite thing to do is it forms.

Weapons.

Extreme creative.

What's your favorite thing to do when you're in the ring?

My favorite event is traditional forms.

Nice.

And traditional weapons.

Very cool.

What's your weapon of choice?

Single Chuck.

Single song.

Good choice.

I love that one.

That was my.

That was my weapon of choice as a.

As a first degree as well.

I like that one.

What's your event at a.

At a tournament that you're like, not.

Not your favorite?

That's a hard question.

I love all but good answer.

I think the extreme form.

Because here in Brazil the extreme form is not a common thing because we don't have gymnastics at school.

So for us it's very hard to practice new tricks.

So yeah, that makes sense.

You know, you don't have access to quite as much of that gymnastics training and whatnot.

I understand that.

I understand.

I love, you know, getting to do those different events.

Single songs.

Wrong.

Like I said, I love.

I love that one.

What kind of goals do you have for martial arts?

Are you aiming to be, you know, a master?

Do you want to teach?

You want to be a world champion Pan Am champ?

What kind of goals do you have?

So as Taekwondo at lead, we all have goals, right?

So for me, I have lots of goals.

My first goal is to become a world champion and I'm keeping hard and pushing hard to achieve this goal.

Other goal that I have is to every country, every country have its brand ambassador.

So my goal is to become a brand ambassador here in Brazil.

Oh, I love that.

That's a great goal.

Yeah, that's super cool.

Be A.T.A.

ambassador for A.T.A.

in.

In Brazil.

That's.

That's super cool.

Well, hopefully you could be able to share this video when it goes live and everybody will see how cool you are.

What does it.

So what does it mean to you to be an athlete that goes beyond the belt?

So going beyond the belt taught me to be more confident, to enhance self awareness, fitness and ability to focus.

Also going beyond the belt is for you to the skills that you've learned on the mat.

You're going to bring them on your real life.

That's great.

I love to hear every different athlete that we've highlighted get to Hear what they think of as going beyond the belt and how cool it is to have kids all over the world learning martial arts and being able to share the fact that what they're doing on the mat is not the only thing, that they're taking that information, that lifestyle and living it out in the world.

And I think that's super cool.

So I want to thank you for being one, an inspiration to all these other athletes out there.

They can see you, see what you're doing and be able to, you know, set some goals like you've done.

And congratulations on being chosen and one of the athletes a week by the junior brand ambassadors here in the US that's awesome.

Thank you.

Well, congratulations.

And do you have any, do you have any tournaments coming up that you're going to be competing in?

Yeah, I have a tourney this month.

It's going to be the Brazilian Championship.

Excellent.

Well, good luck at that.

And then you said your, your goal is to be a world champ someday.

Are you coming to Worlds?

This.

Yeah, I, I, yeah, I was, I am classified to the TOC from the Brazilian Championship, so I'm competing it right now and try to go to the Worlds.

That would be awesome.

Well, if you, if you head out, if you're able to go to Arizona this year, make sure if you see me, you stop me and say hi, because I'd love to meet you in person.

So that would be awesome.

Okay, I would do that.

Excellent.

Well, good luck at the Brazilian Championships.

Do your best, do your awesome skills that we know you have.

Post on social media and let everybody know how you did.

And congratulations again.

Thank you.

18 Nation.

We have with us an international guest, one of our favorite overseas listeners.

Can you introduce yourself for 18 nation?

Sir, yes, sir.

My name is Mr.

Bob Tom Bardwell and I'm the chief instructor at Mango Martial Arts in, in Ireland.

Ireland.

As you might, might have told from his accent.

So we're here at Spring Nationals in Fort Worth.

Absolutely.

You guys actually have a connection to Texas.

Can you give us the history of how kind of you started, you guys started the ATA and then how you got to Ireland doing martial arts there?

Yeah, so we came over to, we've done quite a lot of traveling and my wife's work took us over to, to Dallas.

Okay.

And then my son got into soccer.

He's always been in, into soccer and various places.

You call it soccer?

Yeah, well, I, I saw a little hesitation in the way you were saying it.

No, your audience.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, yeah, and I was like, what's Keon gonna do?

Keon's my middle son, and we really wanted to make sure that he had something to do.

And I remembered that when I was younger, I did some jiu jitsu.

Okay.

So, yeah, when I was six, I started doing jiu jitsu, and I was like.

And he was six as well.

And I thought, I'm gonna find some martial arts.

And the ATA school was the first one I saw.

I went there, he did a class, and he loved it.

And you could see he was absolutely zoned in.

He was ready to go.

And, yeah, it's been.

And so how much longer till you started in and your wife as well?

Yeah.

So he started in December.

We went home, then we came back, and we were started by March, I think.

So, yeah.

Everyone else was on.

There was a small period where the older son, Owen, he started training as well.

And then we were, like, sitting on the side watching, and they said, well, why don't you come on, try.

See.

See what it's like to actually do the moves as all good taekwondo.

Stricter should ask the parents.

Get on the floor.

Absolute.

So who.

What school was that?

Who was the instructor there?

So that's Ata Colleyville.

Okay.

So that was Mr.

Sifra.

He was doing that school at that time, and then he went back to Florida.

And now it's Mrs.

Mugi, who was a brown belt at the time.

And, yeah, so we with her and then under her.

And so now you guys are back in Ireland.

Obviously not right now because we're in Texas, but yes, sir, you get back to Ireland, you guys right away be like, hey, we're gonna do this ATA thing.

Or was it a.

A process to think through?

Well, we were.

We were very lucky.

So we did.

We did Covid in Dallas, and I think that was probably a good place to do Covid in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think we're probably safer in Texas or a little freer in Texas.

Yes, everything's bigger in Texas.

I think that's true.

Uh, so, yes, then there was an opportunity to come back with work.

But also I met Chief Master Schreiber, and he was opening a school in the uk So I was like, okay, this could work.

Well, we were looking at maybe going back to the UK or Ireland, and then we swung it to.

To the UK to.

To try things there and go through the whole opening of school process.

Yeah.

And learning from one of the best.

Yeah.

Oh, you can't go wrong.

Okay, so a question.

So when I talk to some international licensees, every country is a Little bit different in their perspective of martial arts.

Like we're very blessed in the United States where like everybody knows martial arts is another activity that you do and you can have a martial arts school and you can have a full time business martial arts school.

You know Master Tangier from Portugal, Portugal know was like the first guy in this country to open up professional martial arts school.

What's the, what's it like in Ireland?

Is there, are there lots of competition, is it normal thing?

So I have in, in our local town where we are, there is actually another full time professional school.

I don't know that it's their only thing but it is a dedicated space.

That has maxim or whatever.

Yeah.

So they do karate and kickboxing and things like that.

But yeah, when we told sort of family that we were going to come over and open a, they were a little bit surprised.

They were like can you do that really?

Is that a thing?

And I mean to be fair, when we went over we didn't know it was necessarily going to be a thing.

We thought we're going to give this a really good try and we'll do an after school program and see what happens.

We did the after school program.

We did a free taster session and we had 200 people turn up.

We did various schools but yeah, right, brilliant.

Okay, someone's interested in this.

We'll do a seven week program.

And then we did our seven week program and I think it was 120 people signed up.

So we were like, okay, this seems good.

Yeah, this is, we, this has potential.

Yes, yes.

After three or four weeks people were still turning up, which is, which is a bonus.

And yeah.

So we said, oh well let's, let's take the plunge and see if we can get this whole thing sorted out before the end of the eight week cycle.

So we found a place, they managed to do it up in time and we went into our full time location space and how long has it been now?

So we actually opened on St Patrick's Day last year and yeah, we've now been open for just over a year.

And business is good.

Things are going on.

Yeah, the business is very good.

We're delighted.

We have about 150 students.

Fantastic.

So yeah, so wow.

It's great.

That is, that is amazing.

I so random question.

What is with mango?

Yeah, that name with.

So we before we were in Dallas we were actually, we were in Ireland but then before that we were in Singapore.

Okay.

And I like to think that life's a journey and we take different things from different chapters.

But when we were in Singapore, I was always taken by.

There was a tradition where people gifted fruit to other people.

Okay.

And so they do it with mandarins.

And then there was another tradition, I suppose that was different fruits resemble different things or have different meanings of different things.

So mango I looked up was prosperity and knowledge.

And I thought, okay, so this could work.

So we're trying to give the gift of knowledge and prosperity to other people.

I love it.

Students or instructors or whatever.

Yeah, it's such a unique name.

But with it being unique like that, it's very memorable.

Yeah.

Like everybody is like, ah, mango flowers.

I got those.

Yes.

Yeah, that's super cool.

You guys have like a, like a mango character that you like, do some.

Stuff with some ideas.

Am I allowed to have that one?

I'll let you have that one for free.

Let you have that one for free.

You can have your own belt ambassador campaign with the mango guy doing that way you have to come up with a fun name for it.

I'll leave that up to you.

Well, what are your guys's, you know, your international licensees?

I personally would love to see more schools in the uk, Ireland, those kind of places, because I'm key.

Every time I see Chief Master Schreiber, I'm like, hey, I want the European Championships to be in the uk.

And he's like, well, right now we don't have enough schools.

I'm like, well, what.

So you guys keep going.

What, what kind of, what are you guys looking at for the future?

I mean, for your personal training for your school?

Yeah, so I'm a second degree black belt, so I'm obviously hoping to keep going along on that journey.

I'm competing Western at spring nationals.

So, yeah.

Trying to represent for, for Europe, I guess.

Yes.

So yeah.

But school wise, I will have to see how it goes.

Really.

Just keep working.

I would never have guessed a year ago that we'd have been where we were.

We kind of did the, did the math and thought about, oh, is this going to work with student numbers and how many people do we need to break even and that kind of thing.

And then I was like, okay, well this is, this could work.

And it seems to have worked so far.

Now we're actually, I think this is like a exclusive.

I haven't told any of my students this.

I don't know when we're going live.

No, it'll be on the down low.

But we're actually going to open a second floor.

Excellent.

So we've got One bay of this sort of big kind of warehouse place and we're going to have a completely separate one just next to it.

So that's our current kind of growth plan.

Some of our lessons are a bit big, so we just want to make sure that we give everyone the best experience that we can.

That's fantastic, sir.

Well, best of luck.

It was great meeting you here in the, in the States.

Maybe I'll get to meet you over there at your school someday.

Thank you so much for your time and we really appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, sir.

Thank you, sir.

Back to training.

Here's what's going on in ATA Nation.

Want to say thank you to both of our awesome international guests and of course, Keenan, Athlete of the week.

How amazing is that?

Congrats.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, a couple of things.

Make sure you're checking out, staying up to date, close eyes on the fact that we have district championships coming up this weekend.

If you listen to this, when it drops, you might be heading to one of the very last tournaments of the the very last tournaments of the season.

So make sure you're enjoying that.

But district championships coming up, make sure you pay attention to the time slot available to correct points and be ready to register for districts.

Then we got the TOC and the Super 20 tournament coming up in July, Athlete Development Camp coming up in June, and I don't have the date set yet, but the ATA Nation podcast is going to be taking over and doing a couple of live shows on YouTube and Facebook or all of ATA Nation on the ATAs social media pages.

So stay tuned for that.

And if you have somebody specific you'd love to hear from on that, make sure you send us a message.

Facebook, Instagram, wherever you find us.

Until next time at A Nation, get out there and go beyond the bells.

Thanks for listening to another episode of the ATA Nation podcast.

Be sure to subscribe and share with your ATA family.

Secret part.

There was something else I was going to tell you guys.

Oh, guys, did you see on the ATA's Facebook page where Spring Nationals is next year?

Did you guys see it?

Did you see it?

I'm so excited.

It's going to be awesome.

Okay, take care.