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Spike Gillespie has written a wonderful column in the Austinist about our new Junior Black Belt, Senpai Leila. Spike has high praise for Leila:

Can I just tell y’all what it was like to watch a fourteen year-old girl exhibit the most intense concentration I have witnessed? I arrived around three hours into her test—her testing partner was Graham, a grown man—and she was perfectly composed. As those testing her asked her countless questions, not all of them in English, she produced the answers swiftly. But, even better than her accuracy—both in physical and verbal aspects of the test—was how she handled the occasional error. Upon being corrected, she nodded and said a word, that sounds like this: Uhhhs to make it clear she understood. She didn’t flinch, or act upset with the correction. She simply accepted the information, made necessary changes, and moved on. All with an audience intently watching her.

We couldn’t agree more. Read the full article.