More than 400 students, athletes, coaches, officials and referees were drawn to the UB campus April 16-17 for the 29th National Collegiate Taekwondo Championship.
There were 86 universities represented in the competition. Students came from north, south, east and west and the nation’s heartland to participate.
Taekwondo is a sport growing rapidly in popularity because it combines athleticism with demands on the intellect and a higher plain likened to spirituality. It is also popular because it is a sport that has its roots in Asia and has particular cultural appeals to Asian-American students, who now represent a significant percentage of enrollment at many colleges. Many of the colleges in the tournament have fully budgeted taekwondo programs. The 17 University of California-Berkeley athletes and their coaches participated and made the trip as a sanctioned sport funded by the college athletic budget.
The University of Bridgeport has offered Taekwondo or other martial arts programs going back to the 1960s and ’70s. In those earlier years it was offered more for exercise and for self-defense. But in recent years, UB and other colleges are integrating the martial arts into their athletic programs and offering martial arts courses as electives.
UB’s program is run by the very able taekwondo grandmaster, Yongbom Kim, who is an assistant professor in the International College. Kim, who was the coach of the American women’s team in the 2003 Universiade Games held in Daegu, South Korea, last summer, was the leader in bringing the collegiate championship tournament to UB this spring. Kim, whose father was an amateur wrestler in South Korea, started taekwondo at the age of 8, majored in it in college in South Korea, where all of the universities offer an undergraduate degree in taekwondo, and at Kyunghee University in South Korea, he went on to become the first person in the world to win a master’s degree in taekwondo.
Now UB, under Dean Thomas Ward and Kim, is applying for state education approvals to offer the state’s first undergraduate major in taekwondo.
University of Bridgeport
Sunday, July 6, 2025