Emma Cavanaugh / Winonan

While the first week of November will be an ordinary week of classes for most students at Winona State University, sophomore Jenna Grochow will be in Dublin, Ireland for the chance of a lifetime.

On October 30, this mass communications major from Waconia, Minn. will be competing on Team USA at the World Karate Championships. She qualified for Worlds earlier this year by taking home a gold and silver place at nationals. Nationals were held in the Detroit area in June, but her story starts years before then.

“I’ve been doing [karate] for 11 years, and I never thought that I would get this far. I’m getting my fourth degree this fall, and two weeks after I leave for Ireland. When I got my first degree black belt, I never thought I would go past that, and then I got my second and third, and when I was leaving for college, I never thought I would do karate again,” Grochow said. “It just shows how much can happen in a year, and I’m here and it’s really exciting.”

She started practicing karate in 2005. Her dad saw an advertisement in a paper and decided he wanted her to learn it for self-defense. She learned her art at Dojo Karate at Waconia, one of their seven locations. In fourth grade, she received her first black belt, and then decided to take a break. However, with encouragement from her parents, she was soon back to competing.

“I guess I always had a feeling that I wanted to go back and keep going. Obviously, I fell behind a little bit, but I always came back,” Grochow said. “I’d have certain months where I was like, this is it, I’m done. Even when I came to college, I thought I was going to be done. But then something was like, ‘I need to continue doing this.’ There was something always that drew me back. I would go to tournaments and something in me was always like, ‘I want to compete, I want to keep going.’ So that was my drive.”

This is Grochow’s first time going to the World Karate Championships, but she has an idea of what to expect from other teammates who have attended before. There are about eight others competing in Dojo Karate for Team USA. The weeklong competition starts with round one on Monday, Oct. 31. If Grochow does well in her events, she will compete a second time on Thursday of that week.

Grochow will compete in two events, giving her two chances to make it to Thursday’s competition. Her two events are traditional forms, and traditional weapons. At the end of the week, the teams celebrate with a Friday night victory party. Grochow said she wants to do well at Worlds, and has a positive mindset about it.

As a full-time student and dance minor, it can be hard for Grochow to find time to train. Grochow is involved in Dancescape 2017, and considers it training—using dance to work on flexibility and balance, the same elements involved in martial arts. She goes home every weekend to train in preparation for Worlds. The World Karate Championships is by no means the end of the road.

“The martial arts community is super excited because in the 2020 Olympics, they’re going to have sports karate, which is what we do, we compete it as a sport. So I think a lot of us are going to try, we don’t really know how it works but everyone is really hyped about it,” Grochow said. “My mom says after Worlds we’re going to have to start working on the Olympics. Well, let’s just get through this first.”

-By Emma Cavanaugh