Olympic coach teaching new generation of karate kids, adults in Barrington

If you want Olympic-style karate training, travel no farther than Barrington.

Brian Mertel, who coached one of the athletes in the 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, has opened The Garden Dojo at 455 W. Northwest Highway.

For Mertel, operating in the space is something of a nostalgia trip. When he was younger, growing up in the area, it was a video store.

“I’m sure that hanging out with some friends, we frequented this Blockbuster,” he said.

Mertel teaches students beginning at age 4. He said there is no top of the age range.

He teaches standard techniques of martial arts, including the horse stance, the front punch, snap kicks, and front and back stances.

Karate trains students in self-defense, but also goal setting and discipline.

For Mertel, now 43, his odyssey in the sport began when he was about 6, sparked by his father Brad’s interest in karate and watching the sport on TV and in the “Karate Kid” movies.

By the time he was 7, he was competing in national championships. As a member of the junior United States team, he traveled to South Africa, Venezuela and Colombia.

He later competed with the senior national team and continued as a coach.

“Speaking to people from other countries, countries that we’re supposedly not supposed to be friendly with our politics, you find that people are the same everywhere,” he said. “They just are in different situations. They have gone through different things”

Karate has been an Olympic sport only once, at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo that originally was supposed to be held in 2020 but, because of COVID, took place in 2021.

As a result, although Mertel competed in the Pan American Games in Mexico and multiple world championships, he did not appear in the Olympics.

However, he did coach California resident Sakura Kokumai at the Tokyo Games.

Kokumai reached the bronze medal match but fell short of capturing a medal, “but she did a fantastic job,” Mertel said. “I felt very fortunate that she trusted me with helping her and I think that we worked really well together.”

He said Kokumai plans to visit The Garden Dojo in the summer and work with the students.

Mertel said the benefit of learning karate for children is that it lays the groundwork for the ability to do other activities with confidence.

“At those early ages, the value of developing those neural pathways and your awareness of your body movements is so incredibly important,” he said.

But it also can benefit older adults.

For older adults, it’s the ability to … keep moving and memorizing new patterns and keeping the neuroplasticity and developing that and keeping that moving.”

One doesn’t need to have Olympic ability.

“I spent a lot of time competing at a high level and coaching at a high level, but really the biggest benefits for karate are for people that are not at that level,” he said.

The 1,900-square-foot space bears some of the influence of his father, a landscape gardener. There are some Japanese plants in the space.

He said it is a convenient location for him, since it is 10 minutes away from where he lives with his wife, Melina, and children Vera, 4, and Sebastian, 6.

It’s a clean space with white walls devoid of posters and advertisements you might find in other venues.

The interior design also includes the image of a ginkgo, a nod to his stay in Tokyo.

“We were doing some outside training at a track there and we had a little downtime, and I noticed these massive ginkgo trees surrounding the track,” he said.