Kenpo club brings new martial arts style to WSU

The first few weeks of fall semester are always a whirl of activity for student groups; club leaders rush around campus, attempting to establish their club’s appeal.

This is especially true for the Kenpo Club, a newly founded club by Chauncey Ferlet, who is actively recruiting students.

Kenpo is a martial arts style that teaches self-defense and self-control, which emphasizes speed, intermittent power and linear and circular motions.

These self-defense techniques taught by Ferlet can help students develop their skills by allowing them to practice with different threatening situations and experiment with “what if” scenarios.

“One bigger aspect of Kenpo is that you start to think outside the norm,” Ferlet said. “Which is, well, if this happened, I could do this. We start teaching you can also do this, this and this.”

The word “Kenpo” is the Japanese translation of the Chinese word “quanfa,” which are Chinese martial arts. An American, Ed Parker, developed it to explore all the different possibilities of how the human body can be used to defend itself.

Ferlet, 35, has been studying Kenpo for five years. Ferlet’s interest in Kenpo was first sparked as a 16-year-old in north Texas when he met a local Kenpo instructor at the mall. That instructor, Richard Ray, would go on to play a huge role in the development of the business plan, website and promotions for Ferlet’s class.

“When my parents decided to let me do martial arts, there happened to be a Kenpo instructor in town and I went to a local mall and he was already set up there,” Ferlet said.

Though Ferlet eventually joined the Navy and moved away, he still keeps in touch with his sensei, or teacher.

Ferlet reached out to Ray to seek help promoting his class.

“Looking at all of the different possibilities and devising a plan based on your environment— that’s part of the martial arts strategy,” Ray said. “Who uses a phonebook when you can just Google everything on your phone?”

Ferlet is interested in starting a martial arts school in the future and said the best way to find out if you’ve truly learned something is if you can teach it to other people.

“One of the best ways to learn what you’re doing is to become a teacher. You truly become a student when you start teaching,” he said.

Ferlet said he is confident about his club’s appeal to students on campus.

“One of the things this will do is take your mind off of everything that’s going on, and when you can do that a little bit each day, it really does help you,” he said.