Our story
A stick in the backyard
The first weapon in our house was a stick from the backyard.
Blake was seven when he tried an intro class at a local taekwondo school. One board smash and a pair of chux were enough. He came home hooked. We’d had the kids try a bit of everything (Adam grew up on soccer and swimming and was quietly rooting for those), but this was different. Neither of us had ever done martial arts. Adam had always wanted to, after a childhood of Jackie Chan movies, so it’s possible we were a little too excited about it.
What Blake loved most was the weapons. He’d come home from class and head straight out back with whatever stick he could find: spinning it, tossing it over his head, catching it (most of the time), and generally being a very happy goofball.
Three months into lessons, Blake went to his first tournament, a small, Class B event. His form was with chux, lasted 30 seconds, and was so enthusiastic that we thought his helicopter move might actually lift him off the ground. He walked away with his first medal. That was that. He was all in.
A year later, our school offered a color belt bo staff seminar. Blake picked up his first staff, and he has barely put it down since. The first time he carried it into a ring, something clicked. He won a medal that day, but what really lit him up were the other athletes, especially the really good ones. Blake is competitive, to put it mildly, so he went straight back to the backyard.
Outgrowing the backyard
Before long, regional tournaments became our home away from home. Along the way, our instructors saw his hunger for new techniques and cool combinations, and they kept feeding it. Blake would pick up a new move almost immediately, then find a way to work it into his next form. Soon he needed more than regular classes could give him.
That’s when we realized how fortunate we were with our school. Instead of letting him stall, they called in a favor with another instructor, one who could take him further. Blake still trains at our home school, but he also has lessons with instructors over video calls. From there, he took off, learning tricks we still can’t pronounce.
Those lessons opened the door to the wider XMA world. Blake was invited to seminars and camps, days of six or seven hours with every skill drilled hundreds of times. He met other athletes who love this as much as he does, and some of them are his closest friends now.
Most people would call a weekend like that exhausting. Blake calls it fun.
And all along, someone was watching from outside the ring…
Natalie had swimming and dance of her own, but she always had one eye on Blake. At his classes and competitions, she’d be on the sidelines copying every punch and kick. She has always looked up to her brother, so it probably shouldn’t have surprised us when, at seven, she decided she wanted in, too.
Chasing it
We decided to dip our toes into Nationals in Blake’s third year of taekwondo. It helped that we have family in several of the cities where Nationals have been held, so every trip was also a family visit. (That’s how we justified it, anyway.)
At our first Nationals, Blake competed in eight events and came home with one third-place finish. The rest of the results were less exciting, but the experience was anything but. He spent every spare minute watching the other athletes, picking out the moves he wanted, then bringing them home and working on them until they were his.
He built forms, lots of them. Bo staff, creative and XMA routines, made and remade with help from his instructors and friends. Jen spent days teaching herself to mix music so he could have the custom track he wanted. (We are, apparently, a full-service operation.)
Blake didn’t win at his first Districts. He came close, and close was all the push he needed. The next year, he won a district title. At eleven, he earned his black belt, won Districts again, and made his first trip to the Tournament of Champions (the TOC) at Worlds.
He didn’t place at the TOC that year. But now he knew what it felt like to chase one goal for a whole season, and he was already hungry for his next shot at a world title.
Five seasons. Same goal.
The 2025–2026 season was the one where it all came together. Blake chased points all year and finished fifth in the world, one spot outside the top four. The top four earn coveted seeded spots at the Tournament of Champions, giving them the advantage of going last, knowing exactly what score they need to beat.
We sat ringside, probably more nervous than he was (or at least we showed it more). His creative weapons form had several big moves in it, moves he’d been working on for a long time. He landed every one, and his score put him in a tie with another athlete. Then we waited. One by one, the seeded athletes took their turns, and one by one their scores fell short. Then came the tie-breaker. When the judges finally pointed to Blake, we were elated.
Blake won his first world title, in Creative Weapons. He’d been dreaming about it for five years. Not bad for a kid who started with a stick from the backyard.
He didn’t say much. He didn’t have to. It was like a wave of nerves rolled right off his shoulders, and the look on his face said everything. We don’t remember what we said in the moment either. We just remember the feeling. Jen’s fingernails took at least a month to grow back, though.
We always hoped our kids would find something they loved enough to work that hard for. Watching it pay off was something else. The next day, he was already planning how to win more world titles.
It was a big season for Natalie, too. She won state titles in Creative Forms and XMA Weapons, and a district title in Creative Weapons. She nailed her bo staff routine, built on moves she learned from her brother. The little sister who used to watch him from the sidelines is now building routines and making them her own.
Those parents
Here’s the part of the story nobody sees from the ring. When we started, we were brand-new taekwondo parents, and tournaments were a lot. We’d sit ringside hearing scores with no idea what they meant. Was a seven good? What were the judges even looking at? More than once we ended up reading the ATA rule book ourselves. Meanwhile, the kids would come out of the ring asking how they did and how many points they had.
So we started keeping a ringside log. You’ve probably seen those parents with a pen and a growing pile of notes. We were those parents. At home, the notes went into a spreadsheet, because Adam is an engineer and that is what engineers do. It worked, sort of. It took time, notes went missing, and by the next tournament half of it no longer made sense.
Then there were the videos. Jen insisted on filming every event. (Yes, we’re those parents too.) Filming was easy. Finding a video later was not. Adam will freely admit he isn’t the most organized person, and the latest performance was always buried somewhere deep in a phone.
And then came the day both kids competed at the same time, in different rings, across the venue from each other. Adam took one ring, Jen took the other, and neither of us could see how the other was doing. Somewhere in there, with a notebook in one hand and a phone in the other, we thought: there has to be an easier way.
So we built one
TKD Companion took the place of the notebook. Rings, scores, placements, season points and video all live in one place, and it adds up the points right there ringside. It shares rings, too, so when we split up across a venue, we can both follow both kids in real time.
Rep Forge came from the practice side. All those forms, made and remade, had to live somewhere, and paper, spreadsheets and documents kept losing them, usually right when Blake needed something for a lesson. Now there’s a bank of every move the kids know, ready to pull from when they build their next forms, along with their training, goals and progress.
We want to be clear about one thing. No app won those titles. The kids did. The apps just keep track, so we don’t have to.
From our family to yours
We started building both apps around 2023 and used them ourselves for about a year and a half. Then friends and other parents started noticing. “Hey, what is that?” We’d show them, and they’d say, “We want that too.”
So in 2025 we started sharing them around our school, and earlier this year, it finally made sense to share them with everyone.
We hope you enjoy them. See you ringside. We’ll be the ones without the notebook.
Adam & Jen
