Senseis Dustin Wagner and Michelle Chock Talk About Bringing Their Dreams to Reality
Hot off the heels of the Martial Journal spotlight on UND Hisshou Karate with Sensei La Royce Batchelor comes another! This time it is with two of Sensei Batchelor’s students. Dustin Wagner Sensei and Michelle Chock Sensei are not only her students but have opened their own school called Danketsu Shotokan Karate Club. They were very generous and open while telling their stories of how they got started and where they are going. Enjoy!
How did each of you get started in the martial arts?
Dustin: I was first introduced to Karate in my 4th year of college at the beginning of September 2011. It was a Friday night and UND Hisshou Karate had a self-defense class. This class was being taught by both Sensei LaRoyce and Sensei Ryan Porath. Growing up I’ve always wanted to do martial arts, but there was nothing remotely close to me, so just on a whim I decided to go to this event. I walked into the UND Wellness Center and immediately I became uneasy. There were all these people in these white uniforms with different colored belts and I thought to myself “Is this even the right place? This can’t be right.” So, shyly I asked, “Is this the self-defense class?” A majority of people replied with “Yup.” So, when in Rome, act like a Roman. I started doing what everyone else was doing, which was stretching. I don’t remember what was all taught, but I remember there were grapples, there were demonstrations/practicing positions in which the perpetrator was on top holding you down. I remember Philip Ragan was my partner for a handful of these applications. We were punching and kicking targets at one point as well. At the end of the event, the group announced that they had more classes that weekend same place (Sat/Sun UND Wellness Center), so I thought “Heck yea!”
I participated the next two days of classes, but what got me to stay was a guy by the name of Musab Bajaber. We were the last ones to leave the room we were training in and he was talking to me about karate, so I asked him “Musab, I don’t know if this is for me. Everyone here has been doing this since they were young. I’m already an adult. Is it even worth it?” he replied “Yes, it is. If you train hard enough you can test a couple times a year or more and you can catch up quickly.” So, with those conversations, I decided to stick it out and just let fate take the wheel.
How about you Ms. Chock?
Michelle: I have a very similar story to Dustin’s. I saw an advertisement for the same self-defense class while eating supper one night. Being a college freshman four hours from all my friends and family, I decided to go. My sister took a self-defense course at her college so I figured it would be best if I did the same since UND has a lot of fraternities and parties. I talked one of my new acquaintances in joining me. I thoroughly enjoyed the self-defense class. I decided to take up karate but wasn’t very committed to it until February when my boyfriend back home broke up with me. It was then I realized I needed to have friends and a life up here and the only people who seemed to accept me were the UND Hisshou Karate members (It’s kind of cliché, but it’s funny how often cliché moments happen). Two weeks after the break-up, I tested and earned my yellow belt and the rest is history.
How has the martial arts changed your lives?
Dustin: Growing up, I’ve tried different sports and physical activities, and nothing has been a really good fit. For example, I played basketball 5 through 7th, maybe 8th-grade year of elementary school, and my natural ability for it was never really good. However, karate has given me this sense of accomplishment. The goals feel more attainable and satisfactory. As Sensei LaRoyce has said,“make karate, your karate.” This thought process allows me not to compare myself to other people and to not get upset because I’m not as good as the other players and get “benched” for it. Basically, my position, in basketball was to allow the talented players to rest.
It’s been true in the sense that karate is not a sport. I have experienced this in many ways. One example I will share is again, relating to basketball. Even though I was on a team, it didn’t feel like I was part of the team at times. I don’t recall any of my teammates have ever offered “Hey man, let’s stay longer and work on Free-throws, or let’s practice dribbling…etc.” However, karate is very different. All of our karate classmates are your teammates. Except these teammates are wanting you to succeed and are willing to take time and help you and not make you feel like you are not good enough at times.
Michelle: Well, I found the love of my life, so I’ve got that to thank Karate for. Being Dustin and I were both fairly new, we tended to partner up quite a bit because it was always less scary facing a yellow or orange belt versus a brown belt. Using each other as targets, we began to talk more and grow a wonderful friendship. Dustin switched colleges after my first year at UND, but we continued to talk quite a bit. After three years of talking, the timing finally worked out and we decided to give it a shot and here we are now. I love telling people our relationship is founded on beating each other up.
But in all seriousness, the relationships I’ve built with all of our fellow karate-ka is probably the best thing I have gained from karate. With karate, I was able to get to know LaRoyce well before she eventually became one of UND Instructors. If she were just another professor, I’m not sure how much I would have been willing to open up and let her help me with my dream (I want to run my own bakery, and I will elaborate on that later). But since I had that relationship and we keep in contact frequently, I feel it has helped me grow my dream and she will always be a resource in the future. Some of my best college friends and memories are surrounded by karate. We try to make it to UND Hisshou once a month for the simple fact that they are our friends and we enjoy spending time with them.
What made you decide to open a school of your own?
Dustin: On a whim, encouraged, and interest, are probably the best reasons.
Through my years of training in karate, I would talk about it to anyone who would listen. For ~5 years seasonally I worked for the Langdon City Sanitation Dept. There was a gentleman that worked there and his name was Tom Fox. So, naturally, I would tell him about my karate endeavors. In August/September of 2016, I had gotten a text message from Tom asking me about where the nearest place is to train in self-defense. Me, not knowing anything that is an actual legit place to learn self-defense, I suggested UND Hisshou Karate being that is where Michelle and I trained at. He said that would be too far, so he asked me if I would be willing to teach his son Darrell, he even offered to pay me.
I thought about it and talked it over with Michelle. We agreed, however, we didn’t want to get paid, but 1st I had to explain how Shotokan Karate works. I sent Tom a web link about an article done on UND Hisshou Karate that had a great synopsis of what karate is and about. In person, when I met Darrell, I went into more detail about karate such as the Dojo-kun (morals/philosophy of karate), the ranking system, how this isn’t a couple times deal where you learn a few punches, kicks, and grapples and off you go, that this is something that requires commitment, and that we can only teach you so much, until you gain a new rank.
Thus begins our 1st teacher/student interaction. Sidenote: Since spring of 2013 up until fall of 2016 I haven’t done much with karate except for a few weekends here and there, due to college transfer and then later a FT job.
Our group met once a week, on Thursday’s at 4:00 pm at the Langdon Activity Center. Michelle and I would teach for an hour, focusing on a lot of basic material. The only money that was paid was the daily pass to the LAC racquetball court. Everything was completely volunteer from Michelle and me.
After a couple of months Darrell said his friend was interested in karate, so we told him that he was welcome to join. Soon, William Robles joined our group. So our group of 3 became a group of 4. As time went on we trained for testing and seminar being held in Bemidji, MN in April 22nd, 2017. Throughout the start of our group Michelle and I have kept in contact with Sensei LaRoyce through the entire process, looking for advice, ideas, concepts, you name it. With LaRoyce being on the regional board for our North Central Region, she was also keeping other instructors informed as well on what we were doing.
Testing weekend came and gone and we had a sit down with Sensei LaRoyce. She mentioned that the instructors were rather impressed with our group and they suggested we should look into opening our own dojo. So, Michelle and I talked about it and we brought it to our students to get their feedback. We discussed the pros and cons about having our own dojo and they were all for it.
Michelle: Dustin’s answer pretty much sums it up. It was always something he thought about doing. During my internship at UND, I had to travel to different places to research bakeries. I always brought Dustin with and whenever we went to a town, one of the criteria we had to look at was if they had any kind of martial arts. Most locations didn’t have much, so Dustin always mentioned that I could open a bakery and he could open a dojo. So I am here to help and assist Dustin with the dojo because I know he will do the same for me when it’s my turn to set up a shop.
How has the experience of owning a school been so far?
Dustin: An interesting one. Business wise, I have zero business experience and zero business knowledge, so the business portion was stressful and confusing. Eventually, after I did some research on what I thought would have been the correct way of setting up a non-profit business, turned out it was wrong and went to the local law office and got some help. The insurance part was pretty simple. I just talked to my local agent who covers my home/auto and he was able to get me a deal on martial arts insurance.
Another difficult was trying to find a different place to set up our dojo. As you know earlier, we were meeting once per week at the LAC, it’s 5$/day/person. So we knew our students were spending 20$-30$/month/person, but for Michelle and I, we were paying 40$-60$/month combined, so we knew if we were going to be more official, we had to find a different home. If we were going to use the LAC as a permanent home, it would have been way out of our budget. Sidenote: until we actually got settled on a place and had membership money coming in, 100% of everything we did came out of our own pockets. There were many places and people we talked too. The elementary school, two “for rent” closed businesses, local Masons club building, and a very small space in a strip mall. We finally got lucky with the local veterans community building called The American Legion. We gave them a proposal based on a percentage of our income, this way if we have members that come and go, we will still be able to still get an income. We now meet twice a week, generally on Tuesday’s and Thursday’s, from 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
A couple of cultural things we noticed about getting our dojo up and running to teach karate: when it comes to recruiting/getting people interested in our martial arts, is that there are misconceptions about it. Sensei LaRoyce has mentioned throughout the years of her experience and the misconceptions she has seen are similar to what we have experienced. One misconception is that karate is a sport, with that people think of UFC, karate kid, or your action films, which of course is inaccurate. Second misconception we have run into is that a lot of people think that karate is just for kids. We have spoken with a lot of adults and they say “Oh, if I was younger I should have done that” or “I’m too old for to do anything like that”, which is false.
The thing that I like about karate is that it’s tailored to everyone. You grow with it. Again, if you compare it to a sport like basketball, volleyball, hockey…etc. you need to have (x) set of skills to be successful, however with karate, everyone starts out basic material and you gradually work at skills at your own speed. You don’t have that stress at being the best person in the room and comparing yourself to them. The only person you have to compete with is yourself. Of course, having some basic skills, like balance, coordination, flexibility…etc. does make learning karate easier, however, it’s not a requirement, b/c you will develop these skills as you go. It also depends on how hard/often you train, will affect how quickly skills can be developed.
Another issue that I have personally heard is that since Michelle and I are not black belts, how can we be able to teach? Is it not the blind leading the blind? The question is a bit difficult to answer, however, even though we may not know as much as a black belt, we still can teach all your basics and material up to our rank. We have stated to our students, that we are learning as well, so if we teach a concept wrong, we will reteach that concept, once we learn what the correct way is. Like I have stated before, I have learned more about karate in the last ~2 yrs. We basically do the best west we can. We know a decent amount of troubleshooting/things to look for in proper technique. If we don’t have an answer or can’t figure something out. We will write it down and ask someone more knowledgeable in the future.
Teaching wise, fun and challenging. I discovered that up until this point, that even though I have been doing this for ~6/7 years, I didn’t know what I didn’t know…if that makes sense? Back in my early years, every class was new topics, ideas, connections to previous topics…etc., so it was really easy to take in the material at the time, however trying to regurgitate it to teach someone else, you start to realize what you don’t know/can’t recall. I have had many phone/text messages with Sensei LaRoyce on various topics, for example, “Hey I want to do a class on footpath, what would you recommend?” and she would reply without giving a straight answer, but she would give me a thought-provoking question/idea, and I would have to figure it out from there.
I remember this one time, it was shortly after Darrell and Will got their yellow belt, it was my class to teach, so I figured what we would do was to work on their new kata called Heian Nidan, and about halfway through, I realized I forgot how a certain pattern of movements went, and I was so embarrassed. I told myself, I cannot allow that to happen again. Other things I did when starting out. I did a lot of Googling, YouTubing, FB video watching, to try and find material for various topics to teach. An example would be from other martial arts clubs like Charleswood Karate in Canada. Currently, I watch a decent amount of Jesse Enkamp videos. We’ve also been getting more creative on ways to teach certain concepts.
A couple of examples is that we bought some pool noodles, cut them down in size, while using old belts, we strap them vertically to the students back (parallel with their spines), to keep them aware of their posture and how their back should be straight and not leaning too far forward or too far backwards. For mae-geri kicks, for beginners, they have to have their hands out and pretend to be carrying buckets of water, so at my job, I saved and washed out 1-gallon jugs, filled them up with water and the students get to actually carry water w/o the mess. The place I work at was selling old supplies, so I bought an IV pole, tied a long shoelace string to the top and taped the other end of the shoelace to a stress ball. We practice kicking this ball to show the students what happens when you kick your target straight on compared to kicking it at different angles (proper kicking techniques).
Since Michelle and I have been teaching, we carry a bag full of karate materials, such as notebooks, pens, binders…etc. Any place we go for training, whether it be UND Hisshou, Bemidji, Sioux Falls, Winnipeg, or to any other dojos we may go to learn, we take notes, videos, and/or pictures of the material discussed that day. Once we have this material, we put it into an organized word document and add the material to its appropriate topic/discussion. So, as the knowledge continues to grow on our end, this allows us to teach our students and their knowledge too can grow.
Another aspect about teaching/running our own dojo is the enormous amount of pressure we feel. We feel that we have all these eyes on us and especially our students, so at any out of town training, testing or seminar, when people look at them and how they do, they will look at Michelle and I as well. Basically, if they are doing something wrong, right, misbehaving, or whatever the case may be, we feel this will come directly back on us, whether it is positive or negative. This pushes us to strive to do the best we can with the resources available.
Currently, there are 5 people in our karate community, including Michelle and I. We were at 6, but recently a student of ours passed away due to his childhood cancer.
Michelle: It’s been amazing and scary. Like Dustin said, setting up the business was stressful. I went to college for entrepreneurship and I knew just about as much as Dustin. It’s been a struggle to get started up here and at times it feels like the community doesn’t even know we exist. But we’ve made waves in our karate region so it feels like we’re making a difference somewhere.
One of the things I loved most about UND Hisshou karate was how it had this “home away from home” feeling. Even though my blood family was four hours away, I always felt at home when I was around my karate family. I wanted to incorporate that feeling into our dojo (because now my family is six hours away) and I think we’ve finally accomplished that. We’ve been on trips to testing together, we’ve had bonfires, and we’ve had students over to play board games. Along with all the fun memories, I do feel like we’ve grown closer with the passing of our one student. He was so young and I think we’ve all taken the lesson that life is short and we need to live life to the fullest.
Besides standard, in-dojo class training, are there any other events that you sponsor or promote?
While I know you both continue to progress as students of Sensei Batchelor, how have things changed for you personally now that you are in the instructor’s role?
Dustin: I don’t think anything has changed our relationship with Sensei LaRoyce. Sensei LaRoyce is our go-to person for anything and everything still. We are a bit more independent now, but if there are questions/comments/concerns on anything karate-related, Sensei LaRoyce is our #1 resource. I will say that we don’t see her in person as often as we did/would like to see her since she moved to Canada and travels a lot with her job. So, that one on one interaction isn’t very often.
Michelle: I tend to listen more intensively than I probably used to. Before as just a student, I would listen, do as I needed to, and go home. If I had questions, I tended to wait until we touched on the subject again and tried to grasp it then. Now if I am a student in class, I listen and try to understand what is being explained. I ask questions more so I have an answer in case one of our students would ask the same question.
Whenever I have the opportunity to train elsewhere, I am very grateful that I didn’t have to plan class. I appreciate the fact I can train and focus on my karate instead of keeping an eye on how my students are doing.
Another point I try to keep in mind is modeling student behavior. Dustin and I split the teaching 50/50 so we can both get some training in. While Dustin is teaching, I remind myself to model what behavior I expect from our students. I always say “osu”, stay focused, ask questions only if they pertain to our activity, and do what Sensei Dustin says without complaining.
What are you focusing on right now with your school?
Dustin: The topics we teach vary from either from practice to practice or from week to week. A lot depends on what Michelle and I notice during previous classes. For example, let’s say we are teaching a concept and we see that our students are lacking focus, or maybe they are struggling with proper stances. So then we will plan our next class based on our observation. We sometimes plan classes together, but based on my work schedule, I will plan one class and she will plan the second class or vice versa. I’m still finding it hard to break a single concept/topic down into multiple classes. For example, Sensei LaRoyce could break down the topic of footpath and make two weeks to an entire month of classes based on that one topic. I’m lucky if I can get two classes out of a single topic.
Michelle: Basically what Dustin said. Our youngest student plans to test in April and we’re currently trying to find ways to get her to keep her focus and slow things down.
Do you have any goals, personal or professional, going forward?
Dustin: Assuming we are strictly speaking about karate, I have a handful of goals. My number one goal is, of course, is to get my black belt, but with that, I would like to move closer to a place where I can get more training for myself, but I still love what I’m doing. I’m enjoying teaching. I have learned more about karate, its history, philosophy, application, culture…etc in the last ~ 2 years than I have in my entire karate career since I’ve started. So, assuming I was able to move somewhere closer to train with an instructor frequently. I can take that knowledge and possibly start another Dojo again. Another option, not necessarily a goal, but let’s say I end up leaving my current residency and the place I move to has no martial arts (similar to my current town), it’s always an option of starting up a Dojo like I did here in Langdon.
Michelle: My biggest goal is to open my own bakery. I love to bake. Cupcakes are my favorite by far, but I do cookies, cakes, pies, and hoping to get into doughnuts sometime. I remember baking with my mom growing up, so I have some fond childhood memories of making things like kolaches, decorating cookies at every holiday, and making 20+ different cookies/treats at Christmas time. My mother told me I should go to school for business and open my own bakery, but I really wanted to be a CSI tech (CSI: NY was my favorite TV show at the time and I was slightly obsessed). It took a year and a half, but the physics course I was taking was just awful so I went to the bookstore as soon as class got out and returned my books. I switched to an entrepreneurship major the next semester and haven’t looked back.
Karate wise, I guess the only goal I have is to continue to train and teach. And if Dustin decides to open another school (when/if we move), I will be there to help him along the way.
If anybody wants to reach out to you, how should they contact you?
Final Thoughts
I cannot say enough about how much I enjoyed my time getting to know more about Senseis Dustin and Michelle. If I haven’t said it before, I’ll say it now: I really enjoy what I get to do! Not only are they actively working on building Danketsu Shotokan Karate, but are continuing to grow as instructors and students. It is obvious that they have taken the tutelage and mentorship from Sensei Batchelor to heart!
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thinking of moving to Langdon and taking karate