Simmons family teaches martial arts, hosts free community self-defense workshops

By Jeff Breer

There's a reason it's called Simmons Family Martial Arts.

Caitlin Taylor, the youngest daughter of owners and instructors Mike and Lisa Simmons, is a 25-year-old black belt instructor at the karate studio.

They jokingly say "Cait" has been involved in martial arts for 25 years and nine months. That's because Lisa, a third-degree black belt and 31-year year veteran of the sport, continued to take karate lessons while pregnant with Caitlin.

"We joke that she learned how to kick and punch already in the womb," Lisa says.

Caitlin Taylor instructs karate students at Simmons Family Martial Arts in Cape Girardeau.Fred Lynch

Pretty much the same can be said for Caitlin's 31-year-old brother, Ryan Simmons, and 28-year-old sister, Laura Voss. Both are black belts who also started as toddlers, and all have instructed at the Cape Girardeau studio alongside their parents.

All but Laura currently instruct the clientele, primarily youths ages 6 to 18.

As Mike and Lisa note, quite a few of their current students are children of former students. For some, it's a lineage that can be traced back to a gym at St. Mary Cathedral School 28 years ago. For others, it may go back 14 years, when the couple decided to officially open a business for which Mike didn't torment himself considering names.

"We were a family doing it, and we were working with families, and that was the name, instead of something like 'Imperial Ninja Killer School,'" Mike says, prompting laughter from Lisa. "We said this is who we are, and this is what we do."

What they do is teach women and children how to protect themselves. It's been the message from the start.

Lisa Simmons and her son, Ryan Simmons, instruct students at Simmons Family Martial Arts in Cape Girardeau.Fred Lynch

Mike is a professor of mass communications at Southeast Missouri State University and Lisa works in the St. Mary Cathedral church office. They open the studio's doors just three days a week.

In tracing her start, Lisa jokes she became involved in karate in order to date Mike. There's truth in those words. Mike worked in a movie theater at the time and wanted to take karate lessons on his only two nights off.

"So I was like, 'Well, I guess if I'm going to get to see you during the week, I'm going to take karate, too,'" Lisa says.

On the "dates," she became fascinated with the idea of personal safety. The "dates" turned to marriage, and along came children.

"As we got kids, I wanted them to know how to be safe and I wanted to keep them safe," Lisa says. "It kind of mushroomed out from that and spread out to all these teenage girls that were coming to our class down at church; I wanted them to be safe.

"I became involved with teaching more and more women, and then word kind of got out, 'Oh, you teach women self-defense, will you teach our group?' So it kind of started that way, and I never would have thought that would have happened."

Mike and Lisa originally called their self-defense group the Knights of St. Michael, meeting in the gym at St. Mark's in Cape Girardeau.

One of those students in the early years has followed the family theme. Briana Brown started at the church and worked her way up to a black belt. She now has four children, ages 8 to 11, and all are students at the studio.

"My parents said I could not date until I went through a self-defense class, but I fell in love with it and stuck with it," says Brown, who maintained a friendship with the Simmons family over the years.

She liked what the instruction did for her, and started each of her children when they reached age 6.

"It gave me confidence in myself and my abilities to stand up for myself -- and self-esteem -- that if I ever got into a situation, I could take care of myself," Brown says.

Such a situation arose one night when she was a manager at Hastings. An intoxicated man began mouthing off and needed to be controlled.

"I don't remember what all he was saying, but my adrenaline kicked in, and my knowledge, and I had him pinned against the wall and somebody called the cops," Brown says.

Mike just happened to be walking through the door at the time and witnessed his student in action. He made eye contact with Brown but remained on the peripheral.

"What's funny is there were other male workers there and they were all stepping back, like, 'I don't ...' and she stepped up and kept him from getting hurt, kept him from hurting other people," Mike says. "That's kind of the highest goal -- reduce the violence. And she handled it very well. ... So we considered it her black-belt test."

That prompted laughter from Lisa and Brown, and he added, "I was afraid not to."

He is serious about the concept of self-defense, and between Lisa and their two daughters, he's had his eyes opened about violence from a woman's perspective.

"When men teach women how to do self-defense, men do it from a fighting perspective," Mike says. "In a fight, there's a bit of an agreement that we're going to enter this situation and we're going to see who comes out on top. When women are assaulted, it's not a fight situation. It's a radically different dynamic, and Lisa helped me to discover this."

In assault, he says, attackers look for targets they think they can dominate, which makes people hunched over looking at phones and oblivious to surroundings ideal prey.

At free one-day workshops, the Simmonses share information with groups of women on how to keep themselves safe, from initial awareness of their environment to basic moves to disabling an attacker, like a driving open hand to the nose or kicks to the lower body.

"We look at it as more public service," Mike says about the workshops.

A gun or mace can be effective for some, Lisa says, but only if they're in hand. She also says a gun is effective only in as much as a person is comfortable in its handling and possesses a willingness to pull the trigger.

"Half the time women get assaulted with their own gun because they're too afraid to actually use it," Lisa says. "You have to be sure in yourself. I propose you use what you have -- your hands, your voice, your legs. So what we teach is all of that. Screaming, you can bust a guy's eardrums with a really good scream."

Caitlin says the workshops are kept simple to promote instinctual responses in situations that call for immediate action.

"You don't want something, like, 'OK, Step 1 is this, all the way up to Step 24, and do that,'" Caitlin says. "It's more teaching them that no matter what, you can do something. Your better chance of survival is not really knowing what to do, but being willing to do anything and not give up."

It's a mentality she also imparts to the youngsters, and will be ingraining in one of her own -- soon. She's pregnant, expecting Mike and Lisa's first grandchild in November.

"It doesn't matter boy or girl, they're going to learn something," Caitlin says about self-defense.

And in this family operation, like their mom, who earned her black belt at the age of 13, they're already started on that education.