With a Hall of Fame karate instructor for a father, there was little doubt Belleville native Yoko Dozono was destined to take up the sport too.
The results? Spectacular.
Dozono, who now lives and works in Toronto, will coach Team Ontario athletes for the second straight year at the 2016 Karate Canada championships, Jan. 27-31, in Richmond, B.C. She’s the first-ever female to hold a head coaching position for the provincial team.
First training under her father — Belleville S.K.I. Karate School founder/chief instructor, Kenzo Dozono, a 1994 inductee into the Belleville Sports Hall of Fame — Yoko Dozono medalled at various international and national competitions before moving into coaching.
“I’ve always been coaching at the club level,” she said. “When I retired from competition, I was working with elite provincial athletes. Then my first big gig was as head coach for the national team at the 2006 world championships in Tokyo.”
Dozono credits her own coaches — including her father — for helping her reach her current status.
“I had the best coaches when I was competing, and wouldn’t have pushed the envelope this far without them,” she said.
Dozono said coaching karate is less about refining skills than discovering how driven a young athlete is — or, can become.
“As a coach, it’s not about recognizing talent,” she said. “If you work on fundamentals, you find out the athletes’ talent code and where they are headed to. I realized everyone has potential for peak performance — coaching is one aspect — but the biggest is the mind and mental edge athletes have.
“With most athletes, when passion is ignited, it catalyzes fundamental development like technique and skills.”
Dozono said discovering and developing those types of athletes provides the greatest joy of coaching.
“I love the challenge of enhancing the the daily training environment for the province’s high performance athletes,” she said.
Trained through the National Coaching Certification Program (NCCP), Dozono hopes to use her own position to help other women get into elite karate coaching.
“I’m a strong advocate to increase the number of women coaching at the provincial and national levels,” she said. “I’m involved with the Coaching Association of Canada/Ontario, Sport Leadership Conferences and Ontario Coaches Conferences.”
Although her karate coaching specialty is working with senior athletes in kata — the solo combat portion of martial arts competitions — Dozono is very familiar with Team Ontario youth member Julia Wilson, 12, of Belleville, who trains under her father and will compete at Nationals in B.C. Wilson has been training and competing for less than five years, but Dozono says she possesses all the components to be a champion.
“I’ve worked with Julia at provincial team training for youngsters and she has the motivation to train hard, and a higher level of commitment than most 12-year-olds,” said Dozono. “Her mind is there and she’s strong — and tall.”
Dozono says Wilson’s best years of competition are far ahead of her.
“Confidence comes with experience,” she said. “Skill development comes with outside-of-karate training — like plyometric and sport-specific workouts. Being one with mental and physical builds over years of training.
“Julia still has lots of growing on the road ahead.”
A graduate of Nicholson Catholic College, Dozono earned her post-secondary medical sciences degree at Dalhousie University in Halifax and is now a cardiology pharmacist at Scarborough Hospital’s general campus. She’s also a clinical telepharmacist, providing remote clincal services to hospitals in rural Ontario regions.
“I’m a certified diabetes educator working in complex diabetes care and cardiology,” said Dozono. “I’ve also worked as a pharmacist in doping control in sports.”
These days, Dozono says coaching provides all the competitive satisfaction she once derived from competing herself. Well, mostly.
“I’m getting too old to compete,” she said, laughing. “But I train as if I do. Maybe I’ll surprise everyone with an international competition in 2016.”
Courtesy of: Intelligencer