And if everything goes according to plan, the 13-year-old blue belt is hoping it’ll all lead to a national title in the very, very near future.
Nelson is coming off a pair of medal showings at high-level tournaments in recent weeks, claiming silver at the Quebec Open in Montreal during the Nov. 11 weekend and following up with a gold at the Steveston Judo Shiai tournament in Vancouver two weeks later.
Positive signs, for sure, and ideally a sign of things to come.
“Quebec is pretty much the best place in Canada for judo, so that was pretty good, and he won gold in Vancouver against some pretty good kids, so those were two important tournaments,” said Jeff Nelson, Paxton’s father and himself a second-degree black belt in the sport.
“He’s facing the people he’ll be facing at the national championships, so I’m guessing he has a chance at a medal (at nationals) in May.”
In Quebec, Nelson won his first match in the Under-16, Under-38 kilogram division by ippon in 2:45, lost to the eventual Open champion by ippon in 1:20 and secured his silver medal with an ippon at two minutes in his final match.
At the Steveston event, Nelson needed only 26 seconds to win his opening match by accumulation of wazari before going to the time limit and winning by wazari in his second bout. Nelson closed out his gold medal with a 57-second ippon in his final match.
Solid showings all around and the product of plenty of preparation and hard work.
“The most important thing of course is practice,” Jeff said. “You win in practice, not in tournaments, and Paxton practices a lot… you look at someone like (U.S. Olympic medalist) Travis Stevens, he trained 42 hours a week. Obviously Pax can’t do that much, but he wanted to try and was doing six hours a day, but that was a little much.”
Paxton has started working with the Judo Sask high-performance program in addition to his time at Control Jiu Jitsu and at home -- the Nelsons have a judo dojo set-up in their garage -- and feels that extra work has helped him improve quickly,
“I think this year ever since I started going into provincial training it’s been going really fast, exponentially actually,” Paxton said. “The Quebec Open was really the gate-opener for me and showed me what I needed to do, prepared me for Vancouver and that really helped me out.”
Paxton uses a version of seio-nage -- a type of shoulder throw -- as one of his main weapons, in part because of the alternative options it gives him should things hit the mat. And once down there, look out, even with the short amount of ground time allowed to get things finished in judo.
That’s because Nelson is also a rising star in jiu-jitsu under Control black belt Jason Church and was recently promoted to grey-white in the notoriously difficult-to-advance martial art.
“It’s quite good for him because in judo, everyone is going to be afraid to go to the ground with him because he is so good there, so that’s an advantage,” Jeff said.
Now it’s a matter of preparation over the coming months leading up to the Canadian Open Judo Championships in Montreal May 19-22. That translates into at least one high-level tournament and provincial training session a month until taking the mats against the best in Canada.
“Number one is obviously win nationals, and after that it will be to do well at some of the international tournaments and local ones on the side,” Paxton said of his upcoming goals. “But right now, it’s mainly nationals.”
You can follow along with Paxton’s progress on Control Jiu Jitsu’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/MooseJawBJJ.
