A local youth learns self-defense techniques with Battle Ground owner Reggie Macon (Courtesy, Deborah Reed WKTV)
By Deborah Reed
WKTV Managing Editor
deborah@wktv.org
Reggie Macon, owner of Battle Ground JKD LLC, is focused on using his 17 years of personal training to help ensure women and children are safe.
Macon began training his two daughters in self-defense techniques when they were only four years old. He has since expanded to provide that same training to local women and children by founding his martial arts school, Battle Ground.
With countless self-defense and martial arts schools available to the public, Macon differentiates himself by being more hands-on than most.
“It’s not just technique and that’s it,” said Macon. “I teach how to read body language, situational awareness, how to create separation to escape in certain instances, and how to build confidence in oneself to know that just because I know how to fight doesn’t mean I have to. I can walk away confidently enough to know I won’t have to cause any harm.”
To find out more about Battle Ground and the classes they offer, visit their social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram.
When East Kentwood alum Sekayi Bracey was just 8-years-old, her elementary gym teacher encouraged her to pursue running.
“We had a field day,” said Sekayi, who graduated from East Kentwood in 2016. “(My teacher) realized how fast I was. He told my mother that I had a gift and I could go somewhere with it.”
Eleven years later, she’s still running and can claim 10 individual state titles earned during her high school track career. Sekayi also earned a spot on the women’s track team, with a full-ride scholarship to Purdue University in Indiana.
Not long after being discovered by her teacher, Sekayi began running competitively. In 2006, when she was 8-years-old, Sekayi ranked third in her age group for the long jump and 200-yard dash in the state.
Sekayi was highly involved with the Grand Rapids Track Club’s summer youth program. It was her mother, Yamaka Bracey, who founded the group “I was running alone until she started it,” Sekayi said. Describing her experience as “amazing.”
“Honestly, it got me to where I’m at today,” she said. “(It helped me) accomplish the things I did in high school, like breaking records and becoming a state champion.”
The Youth Grant Committee at the Grand Rapids Community Foundation awarded a grant to the track program that year and Sekayi was featured in the organization’s annual report for 2005-2006.
She’s a college freshman with aspirations to work in forensics someday. Another one of her major goals is to compete in the 2020 Olympics. “That has been my dream since I was 8, so I really am seeking to fulfill that,” Sekayi said.
At 5 foot 3 inches, she is on the shorter side for her events as a sprinter and jumper. She advises anyone who also wants to be a college athlete to “stay focused.”
“Always take care of the little things, because the little things help build up to the major things in life,” Sekayi said. “Focus on keeping your grades good and when it’s hard, always just push through because you are going to have hard days sometimes.”
Sekayi describes her running as “an escape.” Prior to each race, tries to “really visualize each jump I’m gonna do, before I go onto the track.”
Her personal records include a 100m dash of 11.68 seconds, 200m of 23.61 seconds, 60m of 7.41 and a long jump at 19 feet, eight inches.
Among these accomplishments, attending college is what she is most proud of. Sekayi said this is because her parents did not have the same opportunity as her. The family has five children, Sekayi is the oldest. Her siblings are all runners, too. “Which is crazy because none of our parents ran.”
Growing up, her role model was Florence Griffith Joyner (Flo-Jo) who is considered to be the fastest woman of all time. Sekayi said that having the ability to inspire people, like Flo-Jo, makes her want to have an impact in the running world.
“God got me to the place I am today, and he has blessed me with a gift,” she said.
“Ditch Lily Drawing,” by Nathan Lareau, is in the ArtPrize 8 Top 20. It is under the installation category. (Supplied photo.)
ArtPrize can often seem overwhelming, with 170 venues and almost 1,500 entries, sometimes it seems as though viewers can only run a quick hand over individual works as so many more beckon during the three-week run.
But the Frederik Meijer Garden & Sculpture Park’s always unique, often astounding, contribution to Grand Rapids’ annual explosion of art is not only a “must see” venue of the event, but it also has a longevity not offered by many of the venues – the show will continue through the end of the year, making it a “must see again, at leisure” opportunity.
Meijer Gardens’ exhibition, “Almost Home: Grand Rapids in Focus,” continues free to the public through the run of ArtPrize 8, Sunday, Oct. 9. It will then continue on display through Dec. 31, available with admission.
In recent years, the Gardens have offered an international snapshot of the modern art world brought home to Grand Rapids. This year’s exhibit still offers a closely curated spectrum – 13 artists and artistic visions – but there is a consistent theme of homemade, homegrown familiarity in the milieu.
“Each artist has a special connection to the city and has offered an original reflection on it,” Joseph Becherer, chief curator and vice president of exhibitions and collections, said in supplied material. “All sculptures and installations were created specifically for this exhibition, reflecting the social and historical, industries and enterprises, the natural and the creative forces that helped shape Grand Rapids.”
The artists in the exhibit include married couples, fathers and sons, longtime local artistic forces and relatively newcomers to Grand Rapids’ artistic home front.
Two that attracted my attention in my first – all too rushed – sweep through the gallery were Nathan Lareau’s simple yet exquisitely complex “Ditch Lily Drawing” and Anna Campbell’s complex yet exquisitely simple “Chosen Family, Chosen Name, Separatist, Safe Space, Ex-Pat, Invert, Homophile, Homestead”.
For “Ditch Lily Drawing,” Lareau uses the clean, simple lines of dried daylily stalks in all-white mosaic that, when carefully illuminated by shadow-inducing spotlights, ceases to be individual objects from nature and becomes a single, textured objets d’art which somehow reminds one of both Michigan’s cornfields in winter and some distant, cold, almost barren, otherworld.
Lareau, born and raised in rural Michigan where the lifecycle of daylilies are familiar, studied and now teaches at Aquinas College. In his artist’s statement he says: “My background in percussion has cultivated a fascination for rhythm and pattern and leads me to seek out examples of such in the physical world. The daylily possesses these elements not only through its time-measuring name, but also the visual rhythm of its growth.”
Campbell’s mixed media installation “Chosen Family, Chosen Name, Separatist, Safe Space, Ex-Pat, Invert, Homophile, Homestead,” in contrast, uses a variety of seemingly incongruent if not conflicting objects – a polished tabletop with a seemingly random spread of small glasses, a piece of children’s clothing hanging lifeless, roped gateways usually associated with entry or rejection at a nightclub.
Campbell, who is new to Grand Rapids and teaches art and design at Grand Valley State University, says in her artist’s statement that “this work is an assemblage of diverse strategies and terms that LGBT and other marginalized people have used over generations to mark the labor of making and naming home.”
My first impression, at first glance, sees the focal point as the glasses: most are grouped together or at least in some pattern (a family, or group, at home?), while several are separate, either seeking entry to the whole or willingly accepting a different path.
I look forward to spending more time with the work, at leisure, after ArtPrize’s run and finding other nuances.
— K.D. Norris
What’s Next:
Artist in Conversation talks on Tuesday, Oct. 11, at 6 p.m. with Ron Pederson and Campbell; Sunday, Oct. 23, at 2 p.m. with Darlene Kaczmarczyk and Lareau; and Sunday, Oct. 30 at p.m. with Norwood Viviano and Joyce Recker. There will be a gallery walk and talk Nov. 1 at 7 p.m. with Becherer.
