getting too popular

My dojang announced a new schedule this week. What it boils down to is 10 minutes less instruction time per class. Instead of a full hour per class, they are going to 50 minutes. From an informal survey, this appears to be the norm. They are also going to change the class format such that they don't teach everything in each class but instead break it up into a longer time period for each skill they are trying to teach you. In theory, "more in-depth" per skill but not as often.

The reasoning behind this is because the upper level classes are getting too crowded. The black belts had classes with the advanced class. Typically, when people receive their black belts, a large number of people stop attending. However, that is not the case at this school as we've been told. Typically, they graduate around 20 or so black belts and they are saying that about 15-18 are staying around for further instruction. They now have enough black belts to warrant their own class. They had to squeeze it in by reducing the instruction time on all the classes.

I shared this with my taekwondo cohort at work and he remarked how when he became a black belt, he was instructing all the time. Now, the 1st degree black belts don't do as much instruction just because there are more of them hanging around at his dojang and the instruction generally goes toward the 2nd and 3rd degree belts.

My analysis: more and more people are getting into the sport and staying in it. The sport as a whole is getting past that early adopter stage. Early for the US anyway.