Written by Erin Speed, News Writer
Photos by Samantha Manning
While most of the other athletic teams practice out in the fields surrounding Bryan Hill, one team practices their sport in a hidden corner on campus. On Latimer 3rd, Zak Barnes and David Holcomb direct Bryan College’s Martial Arts team.
This team offers a wide variety of mixed martial arts for students to experience: isshinryu karate, MMA, judo, kickboxing, jujutsu and more. Each aspect of the sport focuses not only on utilizing hand-to-hand combat, but discipline and patience.
Martial arts are extremely different from sports like volleyball or soccer. Here students learn how to defend themselves in real-world scenarios from people bigger and stronger than they are.
Women especially find value in joining the team, because the skills they build with their teammates help them feel more confident, wield more autonomy and put them on equal footing with their male teammates.
These students don’t practice these skills only for self-defense, however. About two to three times a year, along with several seminars, the martial arts team attends tournaments where their combative abilities are put to the test. Both fists and real weapons—bo staffs, sai, tonfa—fly through the air while judges with real-world experience under their black belts observe. Opponents are pitted against each other in brackets, and these one-on-one matches continue until one winner remains standing.

Bryan’s martial arts team not only teaches self-defense, but discipline and patience. “Whenever you’re on a sports team that isn’t contact based, you can get angry… You might get into a brawl, but that’s as far as it goes,” says Samantha Manning, the team manager, a senior at Bryan College. “But in martial arts, if you get angry, somebody’s gonna end up hitting somebody too hard. So, I feel like it’s a good way to learn how to control your emotions, because you can’t just whale on somebody. You have to still show compassion and understanding while you’re fighting, no matter how upset you are.” Laughingly, she adds, “It has helped me gain a lot of patience that I never had before.”
While Bryan’s team spar with other schools, they also use these tournaments as opportunities to do ministry work by arriving early in the morning to help set up and staying late to help clean up.
When asked what she wished other students could know about the team, Manning said, “I think people don’t realize what we do isn’t as funny as they think it is. So, we’ve had several people try to make fun of us after hearing us make [hissing] sounds while doing kata. All of those have a purpose… It’s tensing, it’s exhaling, so when you get hit, you won’t […] lose your breath, and people don’t really understand that, and I don’t expect them to. But I wish they knew that we’re not doing some ditzy thing. That we’re actually practicing what would be real life.”