For the Estevan Tae Kwon Do Club, the end of the year comes with their second testing day of the season. This year, they had four people testing for their black belts, three for their first degree and one for their second, before they had coloured belt testing for the rest of the session.

"There's all kinds of things that go into testing," says instructor Don DeChief. "They get tested on their required pattern for their rank along with all the other patterns they've learned since white belt, along with kicks and lots of board breaking and self-defence and some other step sparring techniques."

Danielle Stephanie, Taya Saigeon, and Tina Longney all got their black belts, while Simone Saigeon also got her second-degree black belt. There's also a written portion to the testing as well a number of different athletic challenges as well.

Part of the written portion comes from a lot of the proper Korean terminology towards the different kicks, punches, and defences they use.

"We are as traditional as we can make it even though our art is westernized to some degree, but we keep as close to tradition as we can with the techniques that we do so they need to know the proper terminology and that means there's a lot of studying."

There were a few minor injuries during the testing for the black belts, but DeChief is proud of his students for pushing through to make the commitment. This testing weekend means the end of the year for the Tae Kwon Do club, and they'll be taking a break over the summer until the start of next season.