DRAKE Judo Club is partnering with the Tavistock Times to offer free judo sessions on Friday evenings from 5pm to 6pm for a whole year for four to seven year olds at Tavistock College dance studio. Cut out the voucher in today's Times and take along to the sessions to be eligible.Here Ros Hopkins talks to Sarah Pitt about how judo has got her and her daughters hooked!Judo is very much a family affair for Ros Hopkins and her two daughters Alanna and Erin.

Alanna, 13, and Erin, 10, are both members of Drake Judo Club and attend sessions twice a week — held both at Tavistock College and Plymouth Life Centre.

They also compete in both local and national competetions, coming back with a clutch of medals, including a silver for Alanna at the British Schools National Championships.

When Ros first took her daughters along to the club, she kept quiet about her own judo past. It wasn’t long, though, before coaches Ross Taylor and Charles Knape got her to spill the beans.

‘I’m a black belt,’ confessed Ros. ‘I got my black belt three months before my 16th birthday and I believe I was one of the first ones in the country. Definitely I had missed it. I don’t think I realised how much I had missed it until I went and watched my own children doing it.

‘The coaches Ross and Charles asked me if I knew anything about judo myself. I think they gradually wormed out of me exactly what I had done — and Ross is quite persuasive; he persuaded me to give it another go.’

‘It is one of those things, like riding a bike,’ added Ros, now 40, who was surprised when taking part in the Commonwealth Judo Championships as a club member in the veterans category, she came back with a gold medal.

‘I had helped out at the club during the summer but I hadn’t done as much training as I might have as I have a shoulder injury, so I was amazed to get a gold!

‘Ross now wants me to go to the veteran world championships in Poland in the autumn. I will go if I can financially justify it but I work at Tavistock College as a teaching assistant so I don’t earn lots of money! The club are talking about helping me as much as they can but I can’t expect that because I want the kids to benefit, not me.’

Ros’s daughters first got interested in taking part in the club when they found their mum’s medals and trophies.

Ros had competed in the British Judo Squad as a teenager, having been taken along to a judo club by her parents at the age of 10.

‘I was being bullied at primary school and they wanted to boost my confidence so they took me a long to a club in Cornwall — we lived in Bridestowe then.

‘The first session I went to, I refused point blank to go on the mat, I didn’t want to know,’ she said. ‘It looked so scary, these people throwing each other about. While it didn’t stop the bullying, judo made me feel better about myself so it didn’t affect me so much.’

Ros, then competing under her maiden name of Lucas, was well-known on the local judo scene and took part in regional and national competitions. She only stopped when she joined the Navy and sustained a shoulder injury during her basic training.

She said that while her own parents would push her to keep going when motivation was flagging, she took a different attitude with her own children.

‘There is no point in dragging kids along to a sport they don’t enjoy but as long as they are enjoying it, I will go along with it,’ she said. ‘When the fun stops stops, stop, that’s how I see it but so far they are well and truly hooked.

‘They will probably take part in a competition in Wales at the start of February and they both want to do the National Schools Championships in March.

‘They work very hard at it, training on Wednesdays and Fridays and quite often they will have something at the weekend too. This weekend they are going up to Wales to train there is a lot of travelling and commitment.

She said the key to succeeding with judo was “just determination”. ‘When they knock you down, you just get back up again,’ she said.