Born in the Dongming District of Heze in Shandong Province, Coach Wang signed up for wushu when he was 6 years old. He spent his day divided between training in wushu, and completing his studies in school with the other children. His training in these early years was very strict and disciplined; not only doing conditioning and strength building exercises, he would also do drills of basic wushu movements in his own time in order to keep ahead of the others. After 5 years of this arduous training, it all paid off, and in 1987 amongst stiff competition, he became a member of the Shandong Wushu Team.
A short two years later, Coach Wang entered the National Wushu Youth Cup and won third place. This was just the start of his successful professional wushu career which would span over the following decade and earn him numerous awards. In addition to earning medals for his team, he also was called upon to go abroad and perform to promote wushu on an international level. During his thirteen years of life on the Shandong Professional Wushu Team, training was his profession, and he worked extremely hard at it. Aside from his three training classes a day, he spent all of his other time rehearsing his forms; furthermore at other times he would study some more traditional forms from older wushu practitioners.
It was this hard work and dedication that led to Coach Wang becoming the first and only athlete ever to obtain a waiver of the tryout and interview for admittance to the number one sports university in China, Beijing Sports University. And so, Coach Wang ended his professional competition career, and enrolled himself as a member of the class of 2000.
In order to take advantage of this huge opportunity, the majority of his time was spent in the classroom, the training hall, and the library. No matter whether in Wushu theory class, or Wushu techniques training class, he studied and trained seriously, practically studying with every single Beijing Sports University Wushu Forms Teacher.
While attending Beijing Sports University, Coach Wang continued to travel abroad to promote wushu. He was even chosen to represent China at an activity to bid for the 2008 Olympics at which now wushu will be an official demonstration event. Due to his desire to promote wushu to the world, Coach Wang would spend whatever free time he could scrape together to coach the foreign exchange students and other people from other countries that had come to China to learn wushu. Finally in June of 2004 Coach Wang graduated from Beijing Sports University with a degree in National Traditional sports Education.
Coach Wang says, "From the time I started training in 1982, I have not only learned about what wushu is and how to perform it from all of my teachers, but also more importantly I was able to learn of how to be a good person from them, so I am very lucky. So, I hope to be able to share some of this knowledge and culture with people from all over the world."
More
Entry comments (6)