Fencing for Dummies

Thanks to Tim Morehouse, the fencing world's collective hearts have been aflutter with the competition that he and his associates have organized - Fencing Masters NYC.

The really cool thing about this competition is that while you can not only buy tickets and sit with dinner and watch some of the best in the world fence, you can qualify to fence with them! Tim's competition is farming out qualifying slots to clubs around the country for the preliminary competition held earlier in the day. The winner of that competition gets to fence in the evening gala.

And look: there's one of those qualifying competitions not too too far away (although too short notice to get there and make it count for myself or any of my fencers).

Best of luck to the eventual winner of the competition this weekend!

A little status update

This season I'm quite hopeful for the club, despite having had a "1 step forward, 2 steps back" Summer and Fall.

By the end of last season, I'd lost 4, 5, maybe 6 members - at least half of the then current membership.

Since then, I've added a couple of 11 year-olds from a now-defunct club; a college student who had a strong showing at Summer Nationals after only 6 weeks of training with me (she'd been fencing for quite some time, but I'm her first actual coach); a couple of beginners - youth and adult; a fencer who hasn't fenced in a few years; and a longtime fencer, one of the founding members of the club, has returned in force. So while we're a bit more spread out and the club members are less concentrated on training for specific events and the "teams", such as they were, as smaller this season, I've got a strong base to work with. I'm hopeful that I can convince the 11 year-old's parents of the rightness of the electric equipment, especially as the kids want to compete (they're both competitive soccer players, I think the parents look at fencing as something to do when they can't play soccer instead of the competitive sport it really is). 

And, to top it off, I was invited to submit a bid for an after-school program at the elementary school a (former) member. The biggest problem there is that it interferes with the work schedule and the department heads have been increasingly reluctant to allow flexible or alternate schedules, but because my request is for an After-School Program (and who wants to take a stand against helping kids gain confidence and life skills through sport?), I'm hopeful it will be approved.

So far, we've had pretty good results all around. A couple of medals and a new rating to start off the season, and that means I must be doing something right. 

I'm also picking and choosing my refereeing a bit more, and reconsidering my Remenyik availability due to a change in the schedule on that competition that I did not anticipate.