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Health & Fitness

Local Kids Win Trophies at 20th Annual Double Dutch Holiday Classic

Its not just jump rope in the schoolyard any more: Local kids compete...and win......at the legendary Apollo Theater

School kids from Fort Lee score trophies at NY’s legendary Apollo Theater

Jumping rope was fun at recess at No. 1 school when I was a student there.
It was mostly a girls game then as now. But in the 1990s it came to Japan, and guys like Yoshitaka Kato, physical education teacher at The Japanese Childrens Society in Englewood Cliffs, are pushing its boundaries to becoming an Olympic sport.

Kato is a physical education teacher at the school, and since 2008 has been coaching kids - co-ed teams - from Fort Lee , Cresskill and Edgewater - in an after-school Double Dutch club.

Twenty years ago, while Kato was still in Japan, the late David A. Walker, a New York City policeman, started the Double Dutch Holiday classic. Now held  on the stage where Michael Jackson, Ella Fitzgerald and dozens of luminaries have appeared - The Apollo Theater on 125 St.

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Walker had seen some neighborhood kids playing Double Dutch one day while on patrol in Harlem. He thought about teaching more kids the activity, and slowly his idea spread, not only to New York, but to Connecticut, North and South Carolina and as far away as France and Kato‘s native Japan, among other places around the globe.

Kato was a student at Nippon Sports Science University in Tokyo in 1998 when he got interested in Double Dutch, which was unknown in Japan at the time, he says.  He found old movies and watched and watched. He got good enough to recruit others to form a team, but they had to practice at a park because the college would not allow them to use school facilities at the time.

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“Now everything is changed,” says Kato.  “There are many competitions all over Japan.”

Kato moved to the U.S.  to teach Phys-Ed at the Japanese Children’s Society, a school which caters to children of Japanese corporate families transferred to Fort Lee and nearby towns.

Two of the teams, coached by Kato and his assistant, Yoshinaka Nozome, took trophies at a competition last Sunday: Hime (6th graders) and Samurai Jumpers (4th and 5th grade) won fifth place in the Fusion category.

Competitors at Sunday’s event pursue the dream of elevating Double Dutch to an Olympic Sport. As mentioned during the event at the Apollo, a number of sports--synchronized swimming, for example--became Olympic events after strong public appeals to the Olympic Committee.

If it does go Olympic, Japan is poised to win Gold: three teams from Japan took the top three prizes: Ballon Dor from Kusatsu-shi, Fami Coma from Tokyo and EU-CENC from Kyoto in a competition that included speed and compulsory events as well as Advanced Fusion Freestyle - a combination of break-dancing and HipHop ... all performed between two spinning ropes.

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