Kickin' It With Kenny
Senior Kenny Berger stood on the podium this past October at the Pan-American Taekwondo Games, flashing one silver and two gold medals. He had traveled to Santa Catarina, Brazil to participate as a top-ten competitor for the United States and as part of the national sparring team, which placed third in the gxames.
Berger’s beginnings, however, were humbler than you’d expect. To keep him busy during his sisters’ ballet lessons, his parents signed him up for taekwondo lessons at a place across the parking lot. He was only six years old.
“I just absolutely loved it,” Berger said. “It clicked more than other sports, just right off the bat. I was training, going 2 hours every day after class. I wanted to keep pushing myself and my parents just let me.”
Berger quickly progressed to state-level tournaments, and won his first national title when he was nine years old. Now, with a little over ten years of experience, Berger is a third-degree black belt, a fully certified instructor and a World Champion. He has a level two judging certification and holds 25 state, 5 national and 2 Pan-American titles.
He practices traditional taekwondo which includes demonstrative and sparring forms as well as extreme martial arts with jumps, spins, kicks and backflips. “My favorite thing about taekwondo is the one thing I can pick up and go with: bo staff. I really like sparring, which is the fighting aspect of it,” Berger said.
Taekwondo wasn’t always Berger’s forte. Though he won a world title for his nunchaku use, the weapon was initially his least favorite.
“When I picked up a nunchuk for the first time I hated it. It didn’t come naturally to me at all,” he said. “I hit myself with it all the time and it hurt and it was awful and super not fun. But because I was bad at it I just trained for a long time, and I got to be the best.”
“But Kenny is one of those people who makes the effort to get to know people, so we became friends very quickly.”
Berger’s taekwondo expertise inspired him to create a one-of-a-kind club at Exeter, called Illuminosity, which is a performance-based club which combines gymnastics, taekwondo and firedancing. So far, the troupe has performed at Bloc Party, Dia de DOS(e) Muertos and perhaps most notably, the fall E/a pep rally.
“I achieved my full certification for taekwondo last summer,” Berger said. “I was one of the youngest people in the country to have done it, and I wanted to use it—I noticed that there was no prominent martial arts club on campus. There was no gymnastics club either, and I wanted to reconcile all that and I wanted to bring it together.”
Firedancing came easily to Berger; he already had plenty of experience with the bo staff, a very long and tall staff weapon commonly used in martial arts. The real trouble was starting the club itself, and training the members.
“I had to have a plan. I had to have it absolutely laid out because the liabilities were just staring me right in the face,” Berger said. “Not only is [Illuminosity] taekwondo, which is its own deal, gymnastics, which is its own deal, but firedancing, which has obviously never been done before at Exeter or pretty much any other high school.”
Once Illuminosity had prepared a performance and worked through its kinks, students flocked to sign up. In the past couple of months, companies such as Trick Concepts and Redbull have contacted the club regarding corporate sponsorships. “Nothing’s set in stone, but the future’s bright for the club,” Berger added.
During his prep year, Berger attended Exeter as a day student. The next year, however, he decided to move into Wentworth Hall. There and around campus, he is commended as a friendly and passionate person.
Senior Augustus Gilchrist, who met Berger his prep year and continues to maintain a very close friendship with him, said, “One of the things I’ve come to realize about Kenny is how generous he is. The dude is always offering to let me stay in his room, is pretty much always down to talk about something if it’s weighing on [me] and in one particularly desperate moment even let me borrow nail clippers.”
“There are too many [anecdotes] to count. He’s just an all-around solid bro,” Gilchrist added.
Berger said that his decision to live in Wentworth has been one of the most memorable and best choices he has made at Exeter, mainly because of his close relationships with his dorm mates. “It’s nothing but a brotherhood,” he said. “It’s the only way you could phrase it. The culture is just really tight and you don’t really get that with some of the other dorms.”
“You wouldn’t expect Kenny to be the age that he is and to behave the way that he does, and he really emerges as a leader in the dorm,” senior Warren Charleston said. He bonded with Berger during his lower year, as the two had adjacent rooms. “I’m a pretty intense guy sometimes and he’s always the one to calm me down.”
Outside of his dorm life, Berger runs for the cross country, winter track and spring track teams. Although he had run for his middle school distance team, Berger wasn’t a huge fan of running before he came to the Academy; he was originally set on using cross country as cross-training for taekwondo.
When he arrived at the Academy, however, the cross country team’s culture surprised him and he immediately immersered himself in the sport. “It was so very different, just right off the bat. With such a tightly bound group of people I could tell that the traditions and the group itself had been that way for years,” Berger said. “It felt like the moment I started running I was a part of something and that was a very good feeling and it hasn’t gone away in the past four years.”
Anika Ayyar ‘14, who got to know Berger through cross country, commented on Berger’s approachability during practices. “Since the boys’ and girls’ teams don't always practice together, we don't always end up being close to one another,” she said. “But Kenny is one of those people who makes the effort to get to know people, so we became friends very quickly.”
“The part of his personality that stands out the most to me is his unconditional friendliness and care,” Ayyar added. “There are few people that you can always count on to greet you with a genuine smile and a warm hug, but Kenny is undoubtedly one of those people.”
The cross country team’s stellar record motivated Berger to achieve more; the secret meaning of the team’s motto “Ache Te Vitu” ended up changing his life.
“Sometimes people call us a cult and that’s sort of true, but that’s also sort of the best part about it,” Berger said. “You have a group of friends, a group of guys with you, you race alongside them and it’s such a specific thing you’re all working towards: it’s not this grand objective of ‘have a good life’ or ‘get a good job’ or just ‘do well in school’, even. It’s ‘together, you guys have to win this race.’”