“One last hurrah” – Team Bath Judo coach Adam Hall comes out of retirement to fulfil Commonwealth Games ambition at Glasgow 2026
University of Bath judo coach Adam Hall has come out of retirement to enjoy “one last hurrah” at the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games – and he is hoping it will be a golden one.
Hall stepped away from competition eight years ago when he began his coaching career, first as assistant to Juergen Klinger before succeeding the Team Bath legend as High-Performance Judo Coach in 2020.
He was a coach for Team England at Birmingham 2022 but felt the Commonwealth Games was missing from his competition CV, so decided to get back on the mat and see if he still had what it takes to fight on the international stage.
Victory at this year’s English Senior Open and a bronze medal at the European Cup in Latvia in March showed that he had and secured Hall a place in the Northern Ireland squad for Glasgow.
“I needed a goal, something meaty to really throw myself into,” said Hall, who first joined the Team Bath Judo programme as a student-athlete in 2007.
“Judo wasn’t part of the Commonwealth Games back in 2018, when I was still training full-time, so I thought I’d see if I could get there this time. I started off at the English Open to see where I stood, to see if I’d lost too much of it, but I won there and then did well at a couple of European Cups which took me over the performance threshold.
“This is absolutely not a full-time comeback, though. I’ve learned first-hand that you can’t train like a 20-year-old when you’re 38! This is the last hurrah, as it were, and then back to coaching full-time, never to do a competition ever again.”
Hall is contesting the men’s +100kg division and will be in action on Sunday 2nd August, the final day of the Games.
“I think some of my training squad are coming to watch,” said Hall, whose mother was born in Northern Ireland. “The support will be really nice but it might bring a different kind of pressure as well, I’m going to have to practice what I preach.
“A gold medal would be really good – go big or go home. I’ll train the best I can, prep the best I can, show up in the best condition I possibly can and go for it.”
Before heading to Glasgow, Hall oversaw a two-day Team Bath Judo training camp at the University’s Sports Training Village (STV) which attracted nearly 100 judoka from the UK and Europe, from talented youngsters through to international athletes.
That came on the back of the most successful West of England Open yet to be staged at the STV, a National Ranking Event which featured more than 500 entries across two busy days of competition.
“We’ve had around 300 entries for previous competitions, so going past the 500 mark has been fantastic,” said Hall. “We ran the training camp off the back of that and it was a great way for us to show what Team Bath is about, what the University of Bath is about, and demonstrate what we offer to judo players.”
Visit teambath.com/judo to find out more about the high-performance judo programme at the University of Bath.
