Faculty and Staff News

Leon Preston Chosen as Judge for 2008 Olympics

From 3,000 applicants to 300 chosen for initial consideration, Leon Preston, MSW ’73, Lecturer and MSW Practicum Coordinator, was selected as one of just 24 to judge the Tae Kwon Do competition at the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer. He is the only judge in this competition from the U.S.

A seventh-degree black belt, Leon has been an international referee for this Korean martial art since 1989, making him the number two ranked referee in the world in seniority. For more than 35 years, Leon has been teaching and refereeing Tae Kwon Do, whose literal meaning, he says, is “the way of the foot and the fist.” For the past 10 years, Leon has been training athletes and consulting for coaches and athletes on sports psychology. He has numerous invitations both national and international to train athletes. He has also been invited to be the senior public relations officer for the number one sports school in China, a school from which many Olympic champions come.

“What I’ve always found to be extremely beneficial” in these sports roles “is my education in social work,” Leon says, “because in both you are working with people at the grassroots level. Both involve lots of goals, behavior changes, and setting processes into motion to change lives.”

“Where it all began for me was the graduate program at the School of Social Work,” Leon reflected, which he said taught him to believe in the process of change. “It’s a tremendous and humbling honor to get to the Olympics, an honor that is a reflection on the School.”