The community of 108 Mile Ranch will be proud of one of their own athletes, Logan Hendry.
Hendry competed in judo during the B.C. Winter Games, winning a silver medal for the team competition, but unfortunately lost all his individual matches coming fifth in the M+73 division.
“It went good,” he said.
Hendry said his favourite part of the games wasn’t actually competing but meeting new people and hanging out with his teammates.
His coach, Ian Briggs, who runs the Kokoro Judo Club in 100 Mile, didn’t coach Hendry during this year’s games in Kamloops. Instead, two coaches from Prince George instructed Hendry from the ringside.
“I was thrilled. Anytime you get to go to that kind of fun event its a lot of fun,” said Briggs.
Hendry started judo five years ago.
“A friend suggested judo to me because he was doing it and I’ve been loving it ever since,” said Hendry, who also took a break for a while after he burned out a little but decided to come back and relearn.
Briggs said Hendry is a lot bigger than he was but is still undersized when it comes to fighting people in competitions. Only weighing about 71 kilograms, he usually competes in the +78 kilograms division and competed in the +73 in this year’s Winter Games.
“He’s fighting bigger people than he is and that obviously has some challenges,” said Briggs, also explaining other challenges the 14-year-old athlete might face. “Judo is a very tactical sport that requires a lot of repetitions and it’s also hard physically and those two things combined means you have to be a bit tenacious and hard working. You need to be willing to do things again and again.”
Fortunately, Hendry has the patience and stick-to-it attitude required.
“He’s come back after a bit of a hiatus. When he was with us before he was a boy and now he’s a young man so he’s still trying to find out where all his appendages are so to speak, he’s just relearning. He’s learning his strength and re-learning his coordination,” said his coach. “He’s very hard working, very conscientious, but he is just back this year from not having been at judo for a couple of years.”
Briggs said he also faced his own challenges with coaching when Hendry came back to the club as a teenager after leaving the club when he was 12, needing to change and redefine his coaching style when it came to the young athlete.
“There are differences in teaching and approaching sport from those two age groups so I had to reread him in terms of how he likes to receive instructions, how he learns and all that stuff. One minute he’s a boy and the next minute he’s a man and the teaching style changes and I had to redefine our relationship,” he said.
With Hendry now being an established judo athlete after competing in the B.C. Winter Games, Briggs said he is looking for him to possibly mentor and influence younger athletes at the club and said Hendry has future ahead of him in regards to judo.
“I’d like to keep competing, I’m sure there would be a lot more competitions in the future,” said Hendry, adding that he’d like to compete in a national competition one day.