Associations and Splinter Groups

Wow...

I was recently speaking with an Instructor and yet again he had decided to "move away" from the association he was part of.  It was a sad moment. 

He clearly still has strong feelings for the association which he had been a part of for nearly 20 years. Grew from 10th Kyu to 4th Dan in that time.  I asked the reason for the move.  At first he didn't want to talk about it.  Slowly he made mention of how the organisation had changed.  How is was more about the money now.  It was too restrictive in where people could and more importantly, could not train.

So for one more time a split had occurred in a thriving association.

Since the 1960's when Karate got a foothold in the UK we have seen Japanese/Okinawan styles flourish. Grow. Become large associations boasting 10,000's of members.  Then from 1980's ( a few before this time) we saw splits occur within these big associations. Large chunks of clubs and members heading off down a different route. 

Everyone of complaining of similar issues as the ones I mentioned above.  Strange how that even these splinter groups end up with their own splits and the people/groups moving away complaining about the same thing again.

A couple thoughts come to mind. 

• Do the groups that split away from an association just end up becoming the kind of group that they complained about - it certainly would appear so.
• Is it all about......MONEY?
• In many cases it would appear to be a big contributing factor.

But is it really a bad thing?

Did this not happen when Karate was "growing up".  We had schools set up by teachers who spawned great students who then went off and "perfected" their own version of what they had been taught.  Or added other aspects of different training to their core learning.  This all helped to see different styles which added to the richness of we called Karate today.

Without these splits would we have been stuck with a single way performing Karate with very little variation over time?

On the one hand, all these splits should be good for Karate.  Adding variety to the pool of martial arts.

On the other - have really seen any new variants of a style?