Damon Baerg
Shodan-ho 2021
I was born in 2006, february 27 in Calgary, Alberta and I am now 15 years old. I only lived in Calgary for 6 months after I was born and moved to bellingham, Washington. We lived in Bellingham for 3 years and this is where my sister was born. Then we moved to Surrey for only just over a year before moving to nanaimo. I attended Hammond Bay elementary school in Nanaimo for kindergarten to grade seven.
About halfway through kindergarten I started karate in the samurai class. When I was an orange belt I attended my first karate tournament and lost horribly. However, that didn't stop me from going to tournaments. About a year later I attended my first provincial tournament in 2015 and won a bronze in weapons. Then at the next provincials in 2016 a got a silver in team kata. In 2017 I won a bronze medal in sparring at the goju ryu world championships. At my third provincials I got four medals, one gold, one silver and two bronze medals.
It was around 2018 where I had begun to pick up mountain biking. I wasn’t riding too often at this time. I also tried joining brasilain ju jitsu which i only did for about a year. In 2019 I won a gold and bronze medal in both the provincials and in the canada open. 2019 is also the year that I finished elementary school at hammond bay elementary and started high school at Dover Bay secondary school. In January 2020 I qualified for the BC winter games.
Then in February I travelled to Fort St.John for the winter games. When I was there I competed in sparring, kata, team kata, team sparring, and open division sparring. I won a gold in team kata and a bronze in the open sparring division. My last tournament was in the Richmond oval and was the BC team tryouts. I didn't do so well and didn't make it onto the team. This was around where covid hit and I did not compete in any online tournaments.
In spring 2021 I began to learn how to kite surf with my dad. Summer 2021 my mountain biking was starting to really progress and was doing bigger and bigger jumps. In july of 2021 I passed my IKGA black belt grading.