I just finished with a weekend camp in Kingston, Ontario at Queen's University. The university team was hosting the camp run by the Westdale Fencing Club and I got to be a staff member.
Friday evening after arriving and watching the kids fence, we sat down and discussed where we wanted to go from there. There was a lot to work on since some of the campers had only started fencing a couple of weeks ago. Our curriculum was driven by the Canadian "Armband" Program. Something that I had no exposure to until the camp, and after some discussion am finding a good use for and intend to be integrating into my own club's curriculum.
Saturday was a long, long day - We started at 9 and broke for lunch at 12, coming back in the afternoon at 2 and then stopping for dinner at 5. At 7 we came back for a short, but intense, two hour evening session. The morning was filled with footwork and very simple technical work. This helped me re-realize the elegance of just a couple of steps and really slowing things down as I tend to throw lots of footwork at students all at once and then have them work on it as we go. But better, I think is to simplify the entire process and only show one or two steps at once and spend a few hours working on those before moving on to the next piece. Our technical work was almost solely simple, direct attacks. Our aim was just to get the fencers actually hitting each other. We had the coaches and team captains line up and all the fencers got in front of us and just rotated through to the next coach. Very simple actions and each fencer got a lot of work out of it.
Once we got to the afternoon period, after getting a lesson for myself at lunch which didn't last very long (15 minutes), but was quite productive (another thing that was reinforced over the weekend - if you have fencers who are smart and know basic skills, the coach barely needs to talk at all), there was more of the same from the morning. With a slight twist - the team captains stepped up a bit more to start learning how to coach. I was put in charge of another line drill, but this time the coaches lined up so that each fencer would work with each coach before coming around to another action or a repeat of the same. With seven coaches, each fencer got more than enough reps to really work on just reaching out and hitting the coach. All of the actions started with a beat and a cut to the wrist and then usually something to the head or flank. At one point, I made it a bit more complex than it should have been by tossing in a feint, in a way that I thought built off of the previous action, but really one a couple of the team could handle. There were a couple of others that just didn't work the way they should have and that was a combination of the fencers not being able to perform the actions and the coaches/captains not able to cue the actions well.
The evening was filled with bouting and lessons - but bouting in a way that requires the fencers to make things work. They would pick a slip of paper out of a bag and that was their bout (for a foil bout Sunday morning I picked "must score two touches beyond opponent's en garde line". The tasks are suitably open ended so that the fencers have to figure out how to make the actions work in the framework of a five touch bout. The evening lessons were a bit mixed. My first was to someone who had only been fencing for a couple of weeks. The next few were with more experienced fencers, and then I gave a lesson that while perhaps, at first, a little frustrating for the fencer, was a really good experience for me. During the lesson I recognized that she was never going to hit on a riposte, and immediately changed the lesson to fix that. When she mentioned that the Westdale Head Coach had also been trying to help her fix that same thing, it was a nice little boost for me. And after seeing her trying to transfer those lessons to the bout, I was even more excited about the little bits of things I was able to take away from it.
Sunday morning was more footwork but in a completely different way than I'd ever done before. The coaches suited up and had a small group of 4 or 5 athletes in front of them. The coaches then, in the advancing and retreating, gave the students a cue to attack. At first the fencers weren't in jackets and (another interesting bit - making the fencers do the footwork in their masks to keep their center of gravity where it belongs when they're actually fencing) were making mistakes that I couldn't correct easily (in a "you did it wrong, you get hit" kind of way). Once we made them put their jackets on, the drill went better, but I still don't think it was something I'll take home and integrate. I think a pair drill would have been better. Then, we made the captains come up with ways to make things work, specifically the indirect attack and making them coach each other. I was, at the end of the day, pleased with how the captains worked with the team and how the women's captain was able to be a bit more concise and succinct about her feedback to only try to fix one thing before trying to fix anything else.
At the end of the camp, I was very pleased with the progress they all made and look forward to working in a similar situation again soon, particularly if some of my fencers can come and play too, which I think they'll all enjoy doing.
