Sama South East is now a large part of the Sama Organisation. It spreads over East and West Sussex and into parts

of Kent. This is a brief history on how it came about.

Sama South East first began back in 1998, where Sensei George Asargiotakis (at the time a 1st Dan student from

Worthing), decided that as well as being a full time printer, he also wanted to persue his Karate career and become

a Karate Instructor under the Sama Organisation which he had been a member of for the last 6 years. .

Sensei began helping out and teaching in some of the classes in Worthing with Shihan Jacobs and Yondan Klus and started
to gain lots of teaching experience. Several months later, and when Shihan Jacobs was happy with the way Sensei was
teaching, he was then told that he could now teach classes of his own.

Sensei then chose to expand the Organisation and travelled 15 minutes up the road to the Steyning area. Steyning is a

West Sussex country village with many surrounding villages nearby such as: Henfield, Partridge Green and Upper Beeding.

Sensei first approached a school in Upper Beeding and asked if they would consider having an after school Karate club.

Luckily they agreed, and shortly afterwards, Sensei opened up his very first class in his new area.

The class was very successful, at the time there were no other martial arts clubs in the area, so on the 1st day Sensei had

80 children in the class. From then on he approached other near by schools who had heard how successful the after

school karate clubs were. So Sensei opened up more after school karate clubs. - St Peters Primary School in Henfield was

to be one of them where on the 1st day Sensei had 70 children in the class.

He then opened up classes at the Steyning Leisure Centre, Upper Beeding Sports Centre, Henfield Leisure Centre and

also Jolesfield School in Partridge Green. Sama South East had got off to a good start, but at the time was not known by

that name, Sensei had called it "Sama Steyning" as Steyning was the central village with in the area. Sensei continued to

teach monday to satrurday in Sama Steyning and met some very good dedicated students, and friendly families.

They decided to expand the Uckfield area up into Crowborough and further into Tunbridge Wells. Since early 2004, the

area has aquired a further 6 Instructors who have joined the team .

As the area, had grown and expanded so much in just over 4 years, it was no longer appropriate to call ourselves "Sama
Steyning and Sama Uckfield". So after long dicussions with Chief Instructor Hanshi Gibson, the name of"Sama South East"
was born. The name was chosen due to the fact that the area was spread accross 3 counties in the South.