Celebrating Summer Karate Sailing at Fogo de Chão

from Karate College Clubs Summer Magazine 2022

Karate Diplomacy: Bastille Day

8/7/2022 August 29, 2022

This summer, Cassiano created the Karatekas Sailors program and successfully taught over 20 students the basics of how to sail. Inspired by the pedagogy of how we teach and practice Karate, Cassiano applied the same principles to teaching sailing. He created structured lessons every Saturday with a simple set of goals, such as to learn a few knots, how to tack and jibe, understand the wind’s direction, how to leave and enter the dock, as well as how to deal with turbulent winds and handle a capsized boat. By having a clear lesson plan, much like how we teach Karate, as well as enjoyable drills to practice each of the sailing lessons, he was able to help more than 20 students learn to sail this summer. Each student received a hybrid medal as a memory of this program at the end of the summer which has a QR code that takes them to a website with videos where they can review their knots and all the sailing content wherever they are in the world!

To celebrate the success of this program, as well as the success of the kyu exams at the end of the semester, we had a big dinner celebration at Fogo de Chão Brazilian restaurant. Vazrik Sensei provided the results of the summer kyu exams to each of the students, and Cassiano invited Eric Gibber as well from the MIT Sailing Pavilion to deliver a speech about life and sailing. Eric has helped graduate more than 30,000 students in sailing in his 40 year career at MIT, and was an inspiration for Cassiano to make this sailing program this summer.

We hope students can take the lessons they learn from Karate, and the lessons they learned from sailing this summer, and apply it to their lives. #MoreThanKarate