11-year-old girl has four black belts, demands you do one more pushup

There can’t be any more satisfying opportunities as an 11-year-old in today’s world of power tripping than to order a bunch of her classmates to do jumping jacks at will, but that’s what little Samantha Knopfer has going for her. She had the foresight to earn four martial arts black belts before her fellow classmates even knew what karate meant. Watch little Samantha bully a bespectacled kid into crab walking faster as she stands over him like my sixth grade substitute PE teacher Mr. Newbie … only without the huge gut.

Ah, to be young and to stretch your power into a pseudo-dictatorship once more. I still yearn for the fifth grade days when I got to wear that orange ‘safety’ uniform which enabled me to sit in the back of the bus and yell at first graders who had their feet in the aisles. Big pimpin’.

But it’s good to see a little girl develop such confidence at such a a young age. At that age I could barely play kickball competitively. When you take a look at the shots of Knopfer getting interviewed for the karate segments and the shots where she’s actually performing, it’s like watching completely different twins. One’s shy and inward, the other’s a drill instructor bent on getting the best out of her students in any way possible. Though if she tried to teach me I’d probably throw a hissy fit and then demand to fight one of her 11-year-old students to show why I don’t need her instruction.

If you close your eyes, the grunts and instructions coming from Samantha Knopfer sound much older than her 11 years.

The 84-pound blond little girl struts around The Karate Connection in Yorktown as if she owns it. And her dad does. But that’s not what gives Samantha her commanding air. It might be the four black belts she earned last year for various forms of martial arts. Or, it might be that she’s won multiple state and regional karate titles and is on her way to her second national competition in July.

But if you ask Samantha, and she’ll make you lean in to listen to her whispery voice during a one-on-one conversation, she’ll say that her karate confidence comes from all of the hard work she puts in.

My opinion of her karate skills? Eh. I could take her. Scream louder too.

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11-year-old earns multiple black belts, teaches peers martial arts [WTKR]