Yet Another US Open Update

After talking to the coaches and another parent whose son is also an elite competitor like T is we’re not sure which way we are going to go with concerns to US Open 2019. Here’s the skinny, if we decide to attend US Open then T needs, at a minimum, two weeks of twice a day training with his coach along with still doing his team training every weekend. And even after US Open we would need to keep up the one week twice a day per month training from here on out. Here’s the huge benefit to him attending US Open. He earns ranking points with USAT for just attending and he gets even more if he wins an event. Every ranking point he earns up through Nationals in July 2019 is what will be used to put the competitors in the order they will be fighting in at Nationals. The higher you are ranked potentially makes you better off because you’ll potentially have less fights you’ll have to fight in order to get to the gold medal round. With that being said we are trying to figure out how to pull off the finances for all the training plus the finances needed to go to the US Open in Las Vegas at the end of February beginning of March time frame. This intensive training is what’s needed if T is going to be picked by the Olympic Coaches for the US Athlete Academy. What that Academy does is train the chosen kids to get them ready for the 2028 Olympics which means more travel but once chosen T will have some sponsorship. How much we don’t know. He could get fully sponsored or just partially sponsored. We are still learning as we go. He really wants this and doing all this will be very time consuming and is why when he’s not training he’ll be doing homeschooling. This will be his life until he graduates high school and then it would be full on training until the 2028 Olympics if he gets picked to be a part of the Academy. The kids who are chosen that are minors would be traveling to different places to train with the USAT coaches. The senior division will train at the USA TaeKwonDo Training Center in Colorado. So when T gets to the point to where he’ll be in Colorado we’ll be possibly looking at moving to Colorado. I know this is a lot of information to take in but this is what our future is going to be looking like and we wanted to fill you all in as best we can at what we are dealing with right now.