The highly successful and popular KU Taekwondo team is being evicted from its current training location because of health and safety concerns.

The Taekwondo team recently won the inter-university competition held at Cambridge University for the third year in a row. The Cambridge Open is the first taekwondo tournament of the university calendar and the Kingston team won seven individual gold medals at this year’s event. The very next day the team won three more gold medals at the London Open in Crawley. 

The club has a big problem though as it has been told it can no longer use its current training venue at the Kingston Arena. The hall capacity at the site is 30 people but the Taekwondo society regularly has between 40-50 people training with them each week.

KU Taekwondo President Michael Nathan-Pepple said: “Taekwondo is a great sport. We have a great instructor who makes the training sessions fun. When we go to the student nationals we always get good results. We have a good structure, a good student base; we just need more people and a bigger hall to practice in.”

Finding a new place for the team to train has proved difficult however, as Rhiannon Hiscocks VP Activities for the KU Student’s Union, told us:

“Taekwondo’s facilities are too small. We could move to a bigger hall (if there was one) but the instructors may not be able to make that time and it would cost more money. We’re already pumping a lot of money into Kingston College and local schools that are better facilitated than Kingston University. The Students' Union, the University and even students themselves are paying to use these facilities. The College and the nine other venues we use every year charge hire fees. If we re-invested this money into our own facilities instead of wasting it on renting, that would be a much better use of our money.”

A Kingston University spokesman said:“The University is trying to identify sites for sports facilities and recognises the importance of students’ sporting ambitions, however as is the case for many town and city-based universities, there is a shortage of suitable land in the Kingston area on which to build facilities. The University will continue to work with the Council, through the local development framework, to try and identify potential sites for sports facilities, in particular a sports hall.”