Ten Years at Hawks Hill

A note from Justin Coletti, founder and chief instructor

To me the dojo is like a rock tumbler, and if you’ve ever used a rock tumbler then you know that the process is not gentle.

A bunch of rough stones go in a barrel with an abrasive grit, you seal it and let it turn. For days, sometimes weeks, the stones grind against each other and against the grit — relentlessly, noisily, without pause. From the outside it sounds like nothing is happening. But on the inside everything is happening. The friction generated is the point. This friction is what reveals what is actually in the stone.

When you open the barrel, what was once coarse and unremarkable has become something else entirely. The gem has been revealed. The gem that was always there. The gem that just needed some tumbling to find its surface.

I think about that when I think about these past ten years in the dojo.

Where It Started

On March 3rd 2016, I officially opened the dojo with our first class. At the time we were called Troy City Aikikai. We started in rented spaces; that first class was held in a yoga studio in downtown Troy and we later moved to Troy YMCA. In those days we would have put our mats down before each class and stack them in a corner after class was finished as we shared these spaces with many other people. Those facilities weren’t too impressive but we did have a small group that showed up consistently and were ready to train. I was trying to build something, and I was building it in the only image I knew: the dojo where I had trained the most, under the teacher whose influence had shaped my entire understanding of what martial arts were supposed to be.

Back in those days, I though serious training meant severe and I thought discipline looked like austerity. I was demanding of the members in ways I wouldn’t ever be now. I was hard on people in ways I didn’t need to be and made too many assumptions. I look back on that version of myself with honesty, not pride, but I include it here because the distance between who I was then and who I am now is exactly what this anniversary is about.

Eventually, we moved into our permanent home — this barn on my third-generation owned farm on Cooksboro Road, about twenty minutes outside of downtown Troy. I converted it myself, with the help of some of the early members and family, into a training space and a residence. The dojo had become my home. That detail will matter later.

The Ground Shifts

In the spring of 2019, my life began to come apart in several directions at once.

What had been building in my personal life for years finally came to the surface. I won't detail the specifics here but if you’ve gone through a divorce then you will understand this: most people are given the mercy of falling apart in private. I was not. The dojo is attached to my house, and the people who trained here watched the difficulty and volatility of a period I would not wish on anyone. Some of them responded with grace. Others projected, judged, and pried in ways that compounded an already unbearable weight.

Around that same time, a relationship I had built my entire martial arts understanding around — with my teacher, the person whose example I had been following since I first stepped on a mat — fractured and our relationship changed forever. The mentor was gone. The map was gone. And the external structure I had believed in, the organization that was supposed to be a larger home for this work, would soon reveal itself as something I could not rely on.

All of this was creating friction, too much in fact for some that they had to leave. Then the pandemic came.

Lockdowns

When the COVID lockdowns arrived in 2020, the larger organization we originally trained under sent a message that amounted to: stop training, and we'll see you on the other side.

Members here disappeared. Some I understood — life contracted for everyone, and martial arts was not a priority for people managing real fear and real loss. Others left in ways that stung. The community I had spent years building thinned out to almost nothing.

What remained was this: the farm, a practice I refused to abandon, and two people who decided that this place was worth saving.

Lisa — now my fiancée — had joined the dojo as one of its early members. During the lockdowns, she stepped into something larger than student. She became a partner in the work of keeping this place alive. Darryl, known to everyone here simply as "d," had also been one of the dojo's early members. He showed up the same way. The three of us — in a nearly empty dojo, during a period of genuine uncertainty — kept training. We kept the lights on and the fire going. We kept faith in something that had not yet found its final form.

I owe them more than I know how to say in a blog post.

What the lockdowns stripped away — the organization, the external validation, the borrowed framework — felt like loss at the time. And it was loss. But it was also, in ways I couldn't see clearly until later, a kind of liberation. For the first time, there was no template to follow. No one to report to. No inherited expectations about what this place was supposed to look like or be.

It was terrifying. It was also the first time the dojo had ever been entirely mine.

Hacking Through the Jungle

Post-COVID, I felt like an explorer who had been handed a machete and pointed at a dense jungle with no trail.

I had to figure out — through struggle, uncertainty, deep study and honest reflection — what I actually believed - about training, the dojo, my role and even martial arts in general - not what I had been taught to believe. Not what I had inherited. What understanding did I have, after nearly two decades of practice, when no one was looking over my shoulder.

The answers came slowly. They came through reading, through training, through the particular kind of clarity that difficulty produces when you sit with it long enough.

I began examining how techniques were effective (or not) —I didn’t need to focus on just being aesthetically faithful to a lineage. I was interested in techniques that worked — under pressure, with resistance, against someone who was not cooperating. I started to see that the "religious" scaffolding that had accumulated around my practice was obscuring more than it revealed. I believed that character was forged through rigorous physical training, but that forging character was not the same as performing a particular style's aesthetics. I believed in the value of the sword, the staff, the knife — not as dogmatic ceremony, but as tools that reveal the mechanics of movement and the interaction between forces in conflict.

Our training had, through years of honest practice, revealed itself to be much closer to Japanese jujutsu in its intent and focus than to the aikido I had begun with. The name needed to catch up to the reality.

Once established on the farm and emerging from covid and personal difficulties I named the farm Hawks Hill — thus transforming Troy City Aikikai into Aikido at Hawks Hill. And as we approached the tenth anniversary it seemed another transformation had been taking place allowing Aikido at Hawks Hill to become Hawks Hill School of Martial Arts. I have finally accepted that what we were doing here has grown into something that belonged to itself.

Each name change was not a rebranding but an evolution. And each evolution was revealing a more authentic version of the practice here.

What This Place Is Now

Hawks Hill sits on 90 acres of open fields and forest in Troy, New York, on land that has been in my family for three generations. I grew up coming here and watching these hawks, the ones that give this place its name.Those hawks still cross these hills daily, riding the same wind currents they always have.

And inside this barn, we still train and practice regularly: hand to hand, weapons work, swordwork, meditation, breathwork. The training is serious, challenging, and intentional. I care less about how things look and more about how they work. Ego gets left at the door; effort is always recognized. The dojo environment is demanding but welcoming — because those two things are not opposites, and I spent years believing they were.

The property now also houses our integrative health services — where I provide acupuncture, Chinese herbs, and soon Lisa will provide mental health services. These practices emerged from the same values the dojo runs on: intention, practical application, and a genuine commitment to the well-being of the people who come here.

Lisa is our Director of Operations. Darryl — d — is our Student Development Coordinator. The people who stayed when it would have been easy to leave are now the people who define what this place is.

We were named the Best Martial Arts Dojo of the Capital Region by Capital Region Living Magazine in 2025. I am proud of that but more than the recognition, I am proud of what it reflects: that this place, built through genuine difficulty, is doing something real.

Ten Years

When I opened this dojo, I was the rough stone. Coarse, uneven, full of jagged edges I couldn't fully see. Some of those edges damaged people. Students who deserved better. Relationships that bore the cost of who I was before I had been through enough friction to know the difference. I don't say that to be hard on myself — I say it because it's true, and because honesty is the only foundation worth building on.

The decade that followed put me in the tumbler.

The falling out with my teacher. The dissolution of my marriage, played out where everyone could watch. The pandemic. The silence from the organization I thought I belonged to. The members who disappeared. The long, disorienting process of finding my own way without a map. These were not punishments. They were the grit. And the grit does what grit does — it removes what doesn't belong, and slowly, over time, reveals the surface underneath.

I am not a finished stone. I suspect I never will be. But I am considerably smoother than I was in 2016, and the people around me — Lisa, Darryl, the students who have trained here through the years — have both benefited from and contributed to that process.

Which brings me to what this place actually is.

A dojo is a tumbler. That is its purpose. Not to be comfortable, not to be easy, not to confirm what you already believe about yourself — but to provide the kind of friction that transforms. The training here is hard because growth requires resistance. We ask things of students that they cannot yet do, so that they become people who can. We put pressure on structure so that it either holds or reveals where it needs work. That is not cruelty. That is the process.

If you have trained here, you have been in the tumbler. You know what it produces.

If you are looking for that kind of transformation — a place where the friction is real, the community is genuine, and the work means something — the door is open.

Ten years in. Still turning.

"What stands in the way becomes the way." — Marcus Aurelius