You can now work off the calories from AlJon’s Pizza or the Bagel Hole right in Windsor Plaza. Less than two months after its opening Liberty Martial Arts center has signed on nearly 50 students to learn a unique mix of taekwondo, discipline, life skills, and anti-bullying techniques.
The studio is currently located next to the dry cleaners in Windsor Plaza, which is undergoing full-scale renovations to accommodate a slew of new tenants. An architectural design of the plaza’s new look can be seen on a sign at the Alexander Road entrance and other corners in the strip mall. Meanwhile West Windsor politicians have speculated over a handful of big-name coffee and cafe chains that would reinvigorate the old Acme location.
If you plan on getting up at the crack of dawn on Black Friday, you can register to drop your child off at the studio’s free event, Friday, November 25, 4 to 9 a.m., which includes a wake up workout hosted by black belt instructors followed by child safety and abduction and bullying prevention seminars.
Mark Harris, the owner of Liberty Martial Arts, says that once new food and restaurant tenants arrive they would require space facing Princeton-Hightstown Road. Therefore his business would switch to another space around the other side of the strip mall. He was surprised to find an opportunity in West Windsor, but a stop in Princeton led him to open shop.
Harris and his wife, Patricia, a consultant for Dow Jones, were driving on Route 206 through Princeton one day last year, and they spotted the ATA Black Belt Academy. He walked in and met the owner, Susan Winter, who told him about three ATA (American Taekwondo Association) schools that were in her network — Trenton, South Brunswick, and East Brunswick — and that she had a territory license for Princeton Junction and West Windsor. Harris partnered with Winter, and he considers the two locations to be worlds apart clientele-wise. Even though just four miles separate them, Harris says the traffic can create a 45-minute distance while the university setting and suburban setting don’t have much in common.
Harris’ martial arts school offers much more than technical taekwondo instruction. “I’m teaching kids to focus, listen, pay attention, follow directions, and be respectful. We teach them presentation and performance, how to speak to people and make eye contact,” he says.
All students receive official membership in the ATA, which has a base of 300,000 locations across the country. Harris calls even the youngest students, including preschoolers, sir or madam, which he says shows the fundamentals of respectful behavior.
Protecting children is a significant aspect of Harris’ curriculum. The ATA schools are tied in with the Amber Alert program and have developed a child safety curriculum. Apart from physical and verbal techniques used to fend off an attacker, Harris gives each student an ID kit in which they can write emergency numbers for their mother and father and place it inside their shoes, and showing them how to leave important information or even a DNA swab or hair follicle in a plastic bag in the event of an abduction. In the few months the studio has been open, Harris has been proactive in sending messages about such precautions to the community.
“We went to the National Night Out at Community Park, and gave out a couple of hundred kits. We let about 1,000 people know who we are,” he says.
Picking up on new initiatives Governor Christie mandated for New Jersey schools, Liberty Martial Arts provides anti-bullying training for kids of all ages. Harris is one of only 11 people in New Jersey certified in an online bullying prevention program run through Hazelden University in Minnesota. His school offers two anti-bullying methods for students to learn.
“The first one is avoidance and how to deal with bullying. The second is for when bullying turns violent — if they’re close enough to touch you, grab you, headlock you, or choke you. We teach them how to think way before it happens. Kids (need a different approach from) women’s self-defense classes because for them when adrenaline starts going they can’t think anymore. We have to teach them to react but not hit back because they will get in just as much trouble as the bully,” he says.
Harris says training groups play out scenarios where one person calls the other “purple” and the reactions display how insignificant words can be, so that when they are called demeaning names they will learn to just say “so” or “whatever” and walk away. Harris says the next goal is teaching them the right thing to do, which is informing a principal, teacher, or parent.
Liberty Martial Arts is pay-as-you-go. While Harris has run discounts for enrollment during his first two months in business, he says he does charge a slightly higher monthly rate than competitors because he does not wish for customers to be locked into long-term contracts. That idea stems from a personal experience in which he was committed to three years at a martial arts school and then an injury slowed him from attending all of the time, even though he was paying for the classes. Harris says it is fairer to let students go month-by-month if they choose so if they decide it isn’t something they want to pursue, they can walk away without spending more.
Every third Friday of the month Harris hosts a “free date night” where parents of his students can drop off their kids from 6 to 8:30 p.m. and he will entertain them. He says the usual activities include movies and pizza from AlJon’s, but on Friday, November 25, black Friday, he will offer a “mini-weapons camp” so parents can leave kids extra early in the morning and hit the stores for the sales. Kids, meanwhile, will learn about traditional martial arts weapons and self-defense.
Harris grew up in Oceanside, LI. His mother was a legal secretary, and his father was the president of Commodore Computer and then president of Olivetti. He says the area where he grew up saw cultural change during the 1970s when white people stopped going to a popular shopping center because the area had become predominantly African American, and racial tensions increased. He says it was his experience growing up in a suburb of New York that first made him interested in learning martial arts. It taught him to keep some space between himself and a bully so that he would not get physically assaulted.
Harris attended SUNY Stony Brook as a music performance major focusing on the trumpet but decided to move into sales and marketing. He joined the direct sales force of 3M on Long Island and spent more than 15 years working in the corporate world for companies including Royal Business Products and Olivetti Office USA.
He worked for multiple start-up companies from 1995 to 2004. While he originally planned to continue on an entrepreneurial path, he took up martial arts training in 2005, and he realized that it was his passion and his calling.
“I enjoyed training and teaching others and almost immediately decided I wanted to get out of the corporate world to become an instructor and a school owner. In 2008 I achieved two of my goals by attaining the rank of first degree black belt and completing the three-year ATA instructor certification program. I am currently a second degree black belt and will be testing for my third degree this winter,” Harris says.
In August he achieved his third goal of opening Liberty Martial Arts. He says that after opening the studio the primary goal shifts to the mantra of the ATA organization: to create tomorrow’s leaders, one black belt at a time.
Harris is certified in Bullying Prevention Training, First Aid, CPR, S.H.A.R.P. (Sexual Harassment and Rape Prevention), child safety and abduction prevention, and the use of multiple weapons including nunchucks. He is also trained in gun disarmament techniques, which, he says, he has mostly used in rape prevention classes that he has given in Trenton.
Harris and his wife moved to Basking Ridge from New York in 1988. (Harris has a 29-year-old stepdaughter, Sarah Carson, a restaurant manager in New York.) In 1996 they moved to Burlington Township. In 2005 he and his wife decided to head south for Forsyth County, Georgia, just over an hour northeast of Atlanta, into the mountains through “the same road in Smokey and the Bandit,” Harris says. The recession changed the tune dramatically, and Harris and his wife weighed their options. After five and a half years in Georgia spent immersing himself in martial arts instruction, Harris moved to West Windsor in October, 2010.
Coming back to New Jersey was the default option not only because of jobs and the economy, but because he also has family here, including his brother, Greg Harris, who recently ran for West Windsor Council. There was also very stiff competition for martial arts businesses down south, as he says there are 69 taekwondo schools in Georgia and just 23 in New Jersey. Harris jokes that there was “a master on every corner.”
At Liberty ATA Martial Arts students learn the lesson that “choosing your actions” comes before the threat of violence, followed by staying at good distance. The next step is called “making confident faces,” which is a favorite of the children.
“We make faces that look like we’re not victims, and we don’t look like we are mean but we look like we’re not somebody to mess with. We have staring contests and see who can look the most confident,” Harris says.
Black Friday Drop and Shop, Liberty ATA Martial Arts, 64 Princeton-Hightstown Road, West Windsor. Friday, November 25, 4 to 9 a.m. Child safety, abduction seminar, and bullying prevention seminar following a wake up workout hosted by black belt instructors, while parents do their early morning shopping. Register. Free. 800-871-9550. www.libertyma.com.
