MSU instructor to compete in Turkey

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Ron Southwick never imagined he’d be a world-class athlete. In fact, he never thought he’d be an athlete at all.

“Before I came to MSU, I was not athletic — I wasn’t involved in any kind of sport. Honestly, I had a really negative connotation towards sports,” Southwick said. “My image of an athlete was the typical bully. I was the kid who got picked on by the jock, so I really didn’t think of myself as an athletic guy.”

But 26 years after he came to MSU as a student, the 45-year-old faculty member and alumnus will be representing his country Dec. 14-18 at the World Taekwondo Poomsae World Championships in Ankara, Turkey.

Poomsae, traditionally used as a testing and self-development tool in tae kwon do, is a sequence of technical motions and forms performed in front of a panel of judges, similar to a gymnastics floor exercise. Southwick will be competing on the three-man team in the third-ever Poomsae world championship.

A fifth-degree black belt, Southwick began his training in tae kwon do when he came to MSU as a student in 1982. He enrolled in a tae kwon do class taught by former MSU professor Jay Kim and has stuck with it ever since. Southwick said it was Kim who made the sport appealing to him.

“I actually believed in what he said,” Southwick said. “(Tae kwon do) was about … a constant self-improvement, not just gaining a skill, but rather putting me on a path where I was always trying to improve myself.”

After taking over for Kim in 1998, Southwick teaches five sections of introductory tae kwon do to undergraduates each year as an adjunct kinesiology instructor, is head instructor for the MSU Taekwondo Club and vice president of Michigan Sport Taekwondo Inc.

Kinesiology sophomore Vernon Cox Jr. began coming to Taekwondo Club this year after taking the introductory tae kwon do class with Southwick.

“Ron is a great teacher,” Cox said. “He’s supportive, yet he’s tough on us because he wants us to get the idea of why we’re here. … It doesn’t really matter what belt you are, he makes sure you get exactly what you need with the material he teaches us.”

Since Southwick qualified for the national team at the 2008 U.S. National Poomsae Team Trials in July, he has been training nonstop.

“To become a world-class athlete in any sport, it’s going to be hard because you are expected and have to perform at such a high level, it’s not just recreational anymore,” Southwick said. “So you really have to look at it almost as a job — I’ve had to alter basically my whole life for the past five months. I don’t do much but train or think about training.”

Seventeen-year-old Sita Syal, a senior at East Lansing High School, has been training with Southwick for more than nine years. Southwick lets Syal lead club meetings so she can sharpen her own teaching skills within the club.

“I’m just so excited that he’s going to Turkey and representing us,” Syal said. “When he goes and trains with people like other top-class athletes, he brings back all of this stuff. We’re actually a world-class club now, because he can teach us world-class skill.”

Southwick said one of his weirdest moments was seeing his own picture on the Olympic Web site and realizing that he really was one of the best in the world. For someone who used to hate sports, that’s quite the journey to make.

“More than anything, I’ve learned that sport is really good if you take it that way, and you can do some amazing things and find out some amazing things about yourself through world-class training,” he said.

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