Fencing for Dummies

Ballestras

As the search term "Nike Ballestra" gets me the most hits, I thought I'd post pics of the ones I ordered in December.

There they are! 

And they're beautiful! Just as comfortable as everyone promised.

FIE Bans Visor Masks in Foil & Epee

As reported by Fencing.net the FIE has issued a Urgent Letter:

Further to the urgent letter 15-09, the FIE has received the conclusions (attached) of the Sabic Innovative Plastic lab (NED), relative to the mask damaged in Odense. This lab points out two major facts:

- the analysed visor presents stresses linked to its making (injection moulding, instead of hot bend and cold setting recommended by the FIE); stress marks clearly appear at the plastic injection juncture points;

- due to the lack of protection coating against deterioration and scratches, the visor presented several significant scratches. And moreover, some manufacturing standards imposed by the FIE Equipment Rules have not been completely adhered to. Therefore, the Executive Committee has decided to suspend and forbid, until further notice, the use of the transparent visor mask both in foil and epee, at all FIE official competitions.

Accordingly, the USFA has also banned visor masks for Foil & Epee effectively immediately.

Still used in Saber, for whatever reason though.

I have always wondered about the lexan panels in the point weapons, especially epee where the mask is target. I can understand having  them as a status symbol and having one because it's required for use in World Cups, but regularly training and competing with one seems like you're asking for trouble.

What's also interesting that it only took 5 years after the FIE's Medical Commission said fencers should not be required to wear them for the FIE to realize that there are inherent dangers in the usage of visor masks.

Life Update

Let's see, it's been a few months since I last posted so there's lots to catch up on.

The condo is nearly done. My little studio/office space needs some shelves and cabinets to organize everything. There's still a couple of walls to paint, but they can wait until the weather gets a little warmer.

The fencing club is plodding along. Looking at the current schedule, I'm not sure when I'll be able to host an Intro class unless it's on a separate day from the rest of practice. Otherwise, I'm pretty proud of what I've got going. A couple of my youth fencers competed at their first tournament in January and another had his best performance while not having actually practiced in a month before the competition.

The demise of Skyline Fencing brought me 3 very dedicated fencers, and one potential youth. My strengthening & conditioning coach works with a couple of the New Trier girls and he will pass my info on to them. Those two things are nice, but not really sustainable growth. To that end, I've decided to take the semester off from classes to increase my availability to teach Intro classes and promote my club elsewhere.

I've been refereeing and will continue to do so for the next month on a pretty regular basis.  I'll be doing some sort of refereeing or traveling nearly every weekend until the end of March. It has shown me that if I REALLY want to grow my club, I'll need to slim down and be more picky about my weekends away refereeing. The exposure is great, but at this point, if I'm cutting into my lesson schedule and taking time away from my students, it may not be worth it.

Other than specific run-downs of events and trips, that's the general catch-up.