NATSTA’s History – The North American Tang Shou Tao Association

The North American Tang Shou Tao Association grew out of the teaching that founder Vince Black did in the mid 1980s when he was attending Chinese medicine college. While in school, he put his own classes on hiatus to concentrate on studying. Instead of teaching locally, he wound up traveling around the country, teaching xingyi quan at various martial arts schools during his study breaks. According to his own estimation, by the time he graduated there were about a dozen schools scattered around the United States practicing his material. NATSTA was formed to bring these schools together under an umbrella organization with the goal of fostering a wider and stronger community of practitioners.

The association’s initial activities were the first national instructors conference in 1991 and sparring conference in 1992, both of which quickly became annual events and have continued in one form or another until today. These events brought students together from the schools around the country to meet each other and begin a long and slow process of disseminating the information that Vince had accumulated across the association. In 1993, the association’s newsletter was first published and has continued bi-annually until the present. Soon after, the instructor and assistant instructor certification process was initiated recognizing people’s ability to teach in their own schools with the association’s official approval.

After these foundations were laid, the association began its journey and has faced many changes and challenges.

The Early Years

In the beginning, events were small. People got together to test their arts and complete the systems they were studying. Medicine was introduced for the first time and slowly began to be a regular part of conference activities. Vince and his wife, Kim, did or oversaw most of the work themselves.

The Study Group Years

In the late 1990s, Vince thought if new material was taught only at the national conference once a year, the dissemination process would take too long. At the same time, it became too onerous for him to travel to each school and, thus, devised a plan to invite people from across the association to join a ”Study Group,” sometimes also called ”The R&D Group.” This was initially a group of about forty people who agreed to travel every 2nd month to Tucson to train under Vince’s direction for a period of two years. The intense training of these sessions proved pivotal to the process of laying out the xingyi, bagua and other systems across the association’s schools and formed a generation of Instructors, many of whom are still active today.

Conferences

The annual National Conference event has evolved over the years and gone through a number of permutations. There is the National Conference annually, as well as Sparring, Instructors and Medicine conferences. The Sparring conference was for many years an independent event, something like a tournament, but with no winners or losers. The participants fought for the experience and the education. Other years, the sparring event was folded into the National Conference. The same is true for the Instructors Conference and the Medicine conference, some years they have been independent events, other years part of the National. Many years, independent Regional Conferences were held so that people unable to travel to the national events could get together to train and spar.

China

Since the first group trip in 1992, there have been research trips to China almost every year. Some of these were large trips with twenty to thirty people going to train under the direction of our Chinese Senior Advisors and acquire a bit of the cultural experience that informs gongfu. Others were small, focused missions by a few senior practitioners to ask specific questions or seek out new contacts. Both of these are considered important to the association’s work and we are proud to have maintained the relationships Vince began more than thirty years ago with our Chinese teachers.

Vince’s Passing

Sadly, in February 2019, Vince passed away. At his last event, the annual Chinese New Years Retreat at the association headquarters in Tucson, Arizona, he was happy and content watching his senior students teaching and training together. His wife, Kim, his disciples, and many senior students are committed to working together to continue the work he began.

The North American Tang Shou Tao Association is a 501c3 organization dedicated to the research and cultivation of internal Chinese martial arts and medicine.