|
Two dojos in one place will always be tough. It can be done but if too many humans are involved, then there will definitely be problems that may or may not be overcomeable.
In the first dojo where my son and I started aikido, there was one dojo with two senseis. They were each teaching a different style. The students were allowed to attend any class they wanted and the teachers rotated teaching every other day with Sundays off. It worked fine for a while but two things went wrong. 1) The first sensei was popular and had many "friends" who couldn't pay their dues that attended his classes. Once the word got out, there were a more than a few that developed that "problem". The other sensei had students that were punctual in paying their dues but they began to feel resentful of the ones in the other class who weren't. That divided the classes because people who weren't paying then wouldn't attend classes where the students did pay their dues lest someone say something to them. This polarized the dojo and it created two dojos in one building.
2) Then one of the senseis wanted to join a federation and the other didn't. This further polarized the dojo because it caused divided loyalties to different shihans.
Eventually, the dojo split and we all went our separate ways. There were hard feelings at first but eventually, everyone forgot about all that and we all became friendly again (but on different sides of the fence!).
More communication would have been good but the underlying premises about how to do things were different and I think that the two senseis realized that to bring all that out would have caused all out war. At any rate, everyone loves and respects each other now and they have maintained cooperation and a mutual respect since then.
|