Rob Zbilski dedicated to martial arts

HUNTLEY – Rob Zbilski’s definition of success is different than that of other kickboxing coaches.

Zbilski is at a point in his life where he’s looking to re-create past success while creating future success.

Rather than striving for high enrollment numbers or numerous champions, he wants his martial arts school, Team Z’s, to “cater to many things.” He’s done that so far, meaning that at one part of the day he watches children learn karate, while at others he sees kickboxers spar for their next national tournament.

Some of that success of the past was with the high enrollment numbers and numerous champions in the 1990s and 2000s. The walls of Z’s are adorned with several championship belts that belong to perhaps Zbilski’s most promising champion, Simon Buettner of Carpentersville, who’s a 24-year-old professional boxer. He’s won nine national kickboxing championships, the Chicago Golden Gloves and a ring’s worth of other accomplishments.

“He means a lot to this school because he’s an example of what we can do,” Zbilski said. “We can take someone who has no prior experience, never hit a bag, never hit a mitt, and take him and train him, and put him into a professional boxing level.”

But there are more than just Simon.

Zbilski has his children, one of whom has won five national kickboxing championships as a teenager, the other an eighth-grader who’s already headed in that direction.

There was Tommy “Little Dragon” Bach, the kid who dethroned a 64-3 Russian and was once an International Kickboxing Federation World Champion. There was Jerry Rhome, another IKF World Champion.

There were also the hundreds of amateurs and professionals who were trained by Zbilski, the ones who made the Zbilski name and led to his coronation as the coach of various United States Kickboxing Organization teams and, this year, as the president of the organization.

“The thing about our gym is not that I’ve just had one or two champions, it’s that I’ve had over 100 champions,” Zbilski said. “The system that we teach here is proven.”

Before that all happened, there was just Zbilski and his brother Jim, shedding open envelopes every three weeks and phoning the best kickboxers they could find, ready for their next big fight.

Rise and fall

Zbilski’s first kickboxing fight was when he attended Western Illinois University in the 1980s. It was the one that lit the fire.

“I won that fight,” he said, “so it inspired me to continue to train in kickboxing.”

As his knowledge of kickboxing grew, he trained and taught Jim, who was the better competitor. They grabbed about a dozen of Jim’s friends and called it a kickboxing team, one that drove across the county, chasing top competition in an unknown sport in a seemingly computerless world. Those were the first signs of Zbilski searching for better competition to challenge his team, and himself.

In 1989, he gave life to Team Z’s, his first karate school, and it spawned a pair of other schools. Over the next decade, Zbilski coached more than a hundred championship-winning kickboxers, which led to his role with the U.S. team. The way amateur kickboxing championships work is that anybody can show up to the national tournament and fight for their spot, something that’s stuck with Zbilski over the years.

In 2004, he put together his schools and brought them all to Kiley Drive in Huntley, his new base. Then, he had about 450 students, but that was when the name was bigger, when the fights were grander. Today, he has about 200. Zbilski attributes the drop in numbers to the economy, and the drop in name to a shift in focus – the next challenge he has to conquer.

“That’s been my problem in the last five years. I’ve tried to promote and put fights on TV,” he said. “ I want to go back and rebuild our name and rebuild the competition team that we used to have.”

‘A growing period’

When Zbilski has a break from kickboxing, he goes to the gym anyway, to train.

“The one enjoyable thing is that my work is something I enjoy doing,” he said.

Continually training is also part of Zbilski’s definition of success, one that’s strictly derived from hard work. He knows that it’s requisite if America wants to become a somebody in the international kickboxing world, where right now it’s a nobody.

Since he took over as president this year, Zbilski has pushed for greater sponsorship opportunities and open tryouts, which will begin his journey to accomplish his second goal: to “build the U.S. team so it can compete against teams against the world.”

The biggest platform kickboxing could have is the Olympics, but the sport’s presence as one of 130 Olympic sports will be delayed until the 2020s – or even longer, if ever. In the upcoming months, the International Kickboxing Federation will put together a presentation that will seek to break the sport into the worldwide games.

But what that will take is more hard work and openness, which Zbilski knows is doable. He has his short-term goals and long-term goals, both of which he knows won’t be fulfilled by waiting for economic recovery and a subsequent spike in support and participation in kickboxing. He knows he’ll have to do things the hard way, like he always has.

“I think you have to create your own destiny,” he said.