“The biggest risk, is not taking any risk” – Mark Zuckerberg
At the end of 2015 the Cain family decided to take a risk in promoting the 2016 SMAC Internationals. They decided to go independent. It was not an easy decision to make and it came with many complications and uncertainties. Fortunately, for the Cain family, it paid off big time.
The SMAC Internationals was held March 4th-5th, 2016 in beautiful Niagara Falls, New York just throwing distance from the falls themselves. While the falls are quite a sight to see the real excitement of the weekend was inside the convention center at the competition.
SMAC pulled together a good amount of competitors from Canada, Michigan and of course New York. Friday night competition began on time and was quickly on the way. Aided by new scorekeeping technology, the rings ran smoothly and without issue. This is one of the great innovations of the past few years and it allows everyone to see who is next up for scoring, the time and points in every area of the tournament. In forms, Joey Castro managed to slightly edge out an always game Andrew Cabilan for first place. Over in Teams the Core Team wowed the crowd again this year with a great choreographed routine. Not to be outdone, Team Impex annexed El Java Qadir to add to an impressive lineup of: Ross Levine, Jason and Verona Grenier to win the 3 man, 1 woman team sparring. We were quickly done with the Friday events and everyone headed in for a good night of rest to prepare for the Saturday events.
Junior competitors put it all on the line to win a their very own hoverboard for the grand champion winner. In the end we saw Gabriel Bastien riding off with one of the prizes. Jason Grenier ran thru the men’s division and patiently waited for his wife Verona to do the same to make it an all Grenier sparring championship. Overall this was a great event and we applaud the Cain’s for taking the risk to run this tournament independently. There were a large number of things, little things that they did to make this event run smooth and .attract more competitors for next year.
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