Our History
The opening of Gary Sawyer’s club in Orewa - 6th August 2005 @ Orewa College gym 6pm
This night came about with backing of Dave Sawyer (Gary’s dad), Andrew Niven, Francis Fong and Royston Lim. We first opened to students of Orewa College and were initially a school branch off the main Nibun ITF Central club in Auckland.
Over the year we started having more members who weren’t students of Orewa College so we became Nibun ITF Orewa; still reliant on support from Francis and Royston travelling up from Auckland. Francis backed Gary to become ITFNZ’s youngest instructor at the age of 16 and Royston continued to travel up as Gary’s mentor instructor and assisted Gary to pass his 2nd Dan black belt.
Our next move was to take the club to Orewa primary school, where we had Owen Weinstein a black belt Canadian exchange student train with us. During this time we had Spencer Cullen a black belt join us and brought a new aspect of training to us. We also had two 1st Gups join us, Micayla and James Wright, which gave us a lot more depth and they were taken to their 1st Dan black belts by Gary.
At this time we started looking for more competitions and we started looking at WAKO, from this we created Nibun Freestyle Kickboxing. This allowed us to enter competitions with out having to enter under our ITFNZ club.
In 2008 Adriaan & Claudia Heijns joined Nibun Freestyle Kickboxing . Claudia started taking the Kickboxing cardio sessions, Adriaan looked after the fighters and Dave Sawyer looking after the club whilst founding the local youth charity “The Chariot Trust. Gary started to concentrate on his own fighting as he had been teaching for 3 years.
During 2009 Nibun Freestyle Kickboxing became Nibun Fighting Systems. This was when Claudia and Gary became involved in full-contact ring-fighting, which developed and enhanced our club. Nibun was running cardio classes out of a gym in Silverdale where ITF Taekwon-Do was training one night a week and Gary still had James Wright pass his 2nd Dan black belt grading.
Mid 2010 there were lots of requests for Gary to open the Taekwon-Do sessions to new members, the decision was to have a new name, new look and from there Dynamic Taekwon-Do was born out of Silverdale School.
Nibun Fighting Systems also changed with Claudia leaving to start her career as a boxer looking to the Olympics and Adriaan became president of WAKO NZ. Simon Frost took over the running of the Kickboxing club. We moved to a new venue; one with ceilings high enough so that people no longer hit the roof while skipping and no shops underneath us to scare!
2011 saw a change of direction for Nibun with more of our members wanting to fight and train like fighters and the creation of the Nemesis squad which is a fighting team made up of Dynamic Taekwon-Do and Nibun Kickboxing members.
August 2011 – Merging the clubs
6 years from where we started, saw the latest setup come to life, the re-merging of Kickboxing and Taekwon-Do.
Why merge the clubs? Taekwon-Do teaches the great technique, balance and self disciple which is required in any martial art. Kickboxing has a fast, dynamic training system that is fitness based using competitive martial art techniques. Each one compliments the other so that you get training that suits the whole family and now you can train in any session.
Hence we have created Dynamic Martial Arts and left the name Nibun to the Nibun ITF Central and Nibun Liepzig run by Andrew Niven in Germany.
October 2011 – New Venue & New Instructor
October 10th 2011, Dynamic Martial Arts starts in the venue that we had wanted from the very outset, 4a Agency Lane. This date also saw Dave Sawyer return to teaching the full club after founding and successfully running The Chariot Trust.
Gary Sawyer continues to run the ITF Taekwon-Do trainings along with the Nemesis trainings, Dave is now running all the Kickboxing sessions.
Where to from here?
Both Taekwon-Do and Kickboxing are growing with members and the social events allow the family side of our club to grow as well.
Currently we have ITF National champions, WAKO National champions, Full-contact title belts, New Zealand team members in both ITF and WAKO.
At the 2011 ITFNZ National Championships, the Dynamic club came 8th nationally with only 9 members competing and in our region we were the 2nd strongest club!
We have a great group of fighters, full-contact and semi-contact, in our Nemesis Squad, who are competing in ITF, WAKO and IKO Tatami(Mat) and ring events.
September will see our first K1 fight under Nemesis and Nemesis is taking us from strength to strength as the Hibiscus Coast’s Premier “stand and strike” fighting team.