Stats

I have been looking over the Online fencing journal at 14meters.com It shows some interesting stuff.

The win percentages alone are interesting. Since 2005, which is when I first started showing up on askfred, I have a 56.7 win percentage in epee bouts. (truth in advertising here, data for 05 and probably 06 is not complete, Fred was not widely used in this area at that time.) According to the data from Fred, in the 05-06 season I had a 60.9 % win ratio. Nice. In 06-07 it drops to 57.9, 07-08 it goes back up to 62.2, 08-09 it goes up again to 64.8, 09-10 it crashes to 42.7. Thus far in the 10-11 season my percentage is 25. Ugh.

There is a lot more data to mined from this stuff. I encourage you to give it a shot.

Wow

I knew I had fallen out of the competitive spirit but hadn't really realized how far until this past weekend. There was a NAC in Atlanta and I not only didn't go, I actually forgot about it. Usually I would have headed up there if not to fence, then to at least watch, visit the vendors, observe the refs, just to be part of the game. And I didn't. I just plain forgot about it. The club could have fielded an epee team.

Thinking about it, I have competed in ONE tournament this fall. One. In past years I have often got to three events a month.

I wonder if I am sick?

Ok guys, (if anyone reads this) Go to this website

14meters

The online fencing journal is fascinating. Also the referee test is very useful.

Go and check it out.

Rivals

Rivals. Is it a good thing to have a ‘RIVAL” in fencing? Well like so many things the answer is yes, but sometimes no. A personal rival can be a very useful thing to have in fencing. It is good to have someone out there when at the end of the tournament you can say, “Well, I didn’t win but at least I beat you.” In a friendly way that is. What makes a good rival? Well he (or she) should be at about your level of fencing. IF you are picking one, try to find someone that is a bit better than you so you have something to work for. The rival should be at a close enough level that you can either beat him periodically or at least come real close most of the time. You can’t have a good rivalry with someone who beats you silly every time you fence or that you pound on. The rival should also be at a club close enough to you that you get to fence him fairly regularly. To really be a productive rivalry, you should actually like the person enough to sit down and talk to them or go out and eat after the tournament. Lastly, your rival should also be interested in having you as a rival. It is pretty pointless to drive yourself to beat someone who couldn’t care less about you.

Semi humorous tale here. I had a rival like that once. I didn’t know it until several years later. There was a fellow in the club who it seems to have developed an urge to defeat me in every way. If I said something in club about the rules, he would go home and look it up to try and prove me wrong. He would watch me fence and take notes on what I did to try and beat me later. I found out about this several years after the fact when his ex girlfriend was talking to me about the “good old days”. Needless to say I was surprised because he had never registered on my radar as that big a deal. Something on an annoying personality but and as not bad fencer, but I never felt the need to really push myself to beat him. This is a failed rivalry.

To have a good rivalry both of you have to buy into the game. Always bring a bit extra to the bouts against that rival. Always care about winning those bouts. Strive for it. But never get pissy about it if you lose. Ina good rivalry you will lose periodically. That is what keeps it exciting.

Now one question remains. Should your rival be in your club or out? Serious rivalries should be out. Where you fence each other pretty much only at tournaments when the shit is serious. But inner club rivalries can be a lot of fun. It adds a bit of excitement to practice when you can call someone out at the end of practice for a full on tournament intensity bout.

So, when you go to tournaments, start looking for someone who is fun to fence, and then start setting it up. YOU can’t just go up and say, Hey, want to be my rival? It doesn’t really work. But if you talk to him before and after every tournament you are in together. Start dropping lines like “Ah, you again, this will be fun!” Pretty soon they will start to play along and presto, you have a friendship and a rivalry. Or they just look at you like you are weird. In which case you start over with someone else.

Bad rivalries. Yes, there certainly can be bad rivalries. If for example when you use that line, “I didn’t win but at least I beat you.” You aren’t being funny but are being an asshole that is a sign that you are taking this whole thing wrong. Your rival should be a friend. If you actually dislike him then you are doing something entirely different. Fencing should be fun. If you are generating hostility than things aren’t working right and you probably need to rethink your approach to the game.

Just out of curiosity, is anyone but Amanda actually reading this thing?

Starting fencing

So, I am sure that most beginning fencers ask themselves at some point, “Why can’t we just fence instead of doing all this STUFF?” Well, frankly, at some clubs you can. These clubs tend be either the REALLY good clubs, or the REALLY bad ones. For example, I have been told by members of the club that when a beginner walks into Nellya he or she is dressed out and told to go fence. One of the mid range fencers there takes him over to a strip and they start to fence. This works because there is such an abundance of talent available that the Coach, excuse me, Maestro, is absolutely confident that The beginner will be steered away from any bad habits and, if he gets those habits he is confident that he and his coaching staff can break the beginner of them. Judging from the fencers that come out of Nellya, it seems to work for them. On the other end of the spectrum, some small clubs, generally those without any real coaching at all when the get a beginner tend to dress the fellow up and let him learn from osmosis and he fences the others in the club. This tends to turn out pretty scary fencers. Not scary because they are good but scary because they do really wild and crazy shit on the strip. If the beginner is athletic and coordinated he can often get good enough to earn at least a D, sometimes a C (in foil) or even better in Epee if he is really fast too. But once he hits the point where his wild and crazy stops intimidating his opponents, he stops winning. And unfortunately, once those wild and crazy things get embedded in a fencers psyche it is VERY hard to get them back out. Bad habits are real easy to pick up and REALLY hard to lose. It can be done if there is a good coach available and the fencer has a lot of time and desire to change. But it is hard and time consuming.

Now, in my case I will not let someone “Just fence.” In fact I will get annoyed with you if you start to do it on your own. In our club I unfortunately do have the time to give every fencer the individual attention needed to overcome those bad habits picked up by early bouting. And there are not (yet) a strong enough cadre of senior fencers back fill the time. And in a college club we will rarely get a lot of members who can do that much because about the time you get good at it you graduate and leave.

So the best bet to become a competent fencer in the situation we are in is to learn all the basics first and then start to put them together. I know it isn’t as fun, but it is a system that works for us.

How it used to be.

Many fencers today do not realize that this tournament format we use now is; A. Not the way if has always been done, of B. Not the only way you are allowed to do it even now.

When I started fencing, and for many years after that, the standard format for tournaments was pools. A round, of pools, followed by another round of pools, followed by another round of pools. In each round the a percentage of the fencers were dropped. For example, if you started an event with 30 fencers the first round would be either six pools of five, or five pools of six. You were required to advance at least 50% from each round so in either case the top three from each pool (probably) would advance to the second round. ( I say probably because they could decide to advance 4 people from each pool if they wished, or even 5 from the pools of six although that would be pretty extreme.) Who advanced was determined by results of the pool. Victories of course were counted first, than indicators, then fewer touches received, then touches scored.
(At the time it was considered more important to have not been hit than it was to hit.) (To really confuse you, when I started fencing, scores were not kept by how many times you hit your opponent, but by how many times you got hit. First person to five lost. But we will leave that out of the explanation for now)
Fencers in those days kept a close eye on their indicators. I recall sitting by the strip cheering for a guy to score at least three points but not win so that I would advance due to indicators over his opponent. Once you figured out how things worked you paid attention to every point.

So in our thirty person event, we’ll say there were five pools of six, three advance. So the second round will have three pools of five. If you advanced three from this round you would have nine which is awkward, so you would probably advance four people into two pools of six into a final of six. At the end of the day the person with the best record in the final pool wins. First place though could not be decided by indicators, only by victories, so if there were a tie in victories the two (or three, or four) fencers who were tied would have to fence off for the victory. (it was conceivable that if there was a five person pool they could each win two bouts and have to fence the pool over in the barrage for first place) When I said “at the end of the day” I meant it. Events like this took a L O N G time to fence. There were events that would start early in the morning, eight to ten AM, and end early in the morning, one to two AM. Think you are tired now when you make the finals? Wait until you have been fencing for twelve hours and you are in your fifth pool and each pool has been harder than the one before it. Conditioning was an issue. But, if you were good enough, you got a LOT more fencing for your money.

This format is still acceptable. We could hold tournaments doing it now. But people are scared of the time factor. But it is still practical for a smaller event, say less than thirty fencers. It should be used as it will give especially the top fencers more quality bouts. Instead of burning through some cannon fodder before getting a hard bout in the round of eight, or four, when you make the final pool you get to fence five bouts against the top five fencers of the day. Not a bad way to finish off if you ask me.

Things in the head....

I have never seen a Twilight movie. Never really been interested. I read the first book back when it came out after I read an interview with the author where she told about how she wrote it from a dream she had. I thought the book was ok but nothing to get really excited about. But as I see the previews for this latest movie I confess I am tempted. (Trust me folks, this will work its way around to fencing, just be patient.) The first reason I am tempted is because the werewolves are just too cool looking. I know they probably show all the really good scenes in the trailer and the rest blows but damn, they just look cool. I thought that when I saw the previews for the last movie too but there are more cool wolf scenes in this one. (Can anyone explain why the chick didn’t go for the werewolf instead of the effeminate whiny rich kid vampire? Oh wait, tormented, rich and brooding, that seems to be the thing ever since Buffy came out, got it.) The other reason I am tempted to see this is because in these previews I keep getting glimpses of a red headed vampire. And here is where Stephanie Meyers and I sort of karmicly come together. You see many many, years ago I had a dream that featured a red headed female vampire. Now understand this was way before the current vampire craze got started. This was in the late 80s or early 90s. But in my dream, this red headed vampire showed up and wanted to learn to fence. She always showed up late or arranged lessons after dark. I recall being really frustrated in the dream that she would never go to tournaments. Somehow I eventually figured out that she was a vampire and in the dream I remember that moment. The light comes on in my head so to speak and I grab a wooden chair and smash it on the floor so I have one leg that is long and comes to a sharp point and assume an en guarde position and say something really stupid like “Just try it, I can hit your heart with a lunge.” (My dreams obviously need better dialogue coaches) The vampire just laughs and says “If I wanted to kill you I could have done it ages ago. But then I wouldn’t have a fencing coach.” So we worked it out, she kept taking lessons and no one (that I knew at least) got bitten. There was one point in the dream where she commented that even if she could find a night time tournament she probably wouldn’t go because she didn’t think it would be fair fencing humans when she had the extra physical capabilities of a vampire. As I recall I said something like “Don’t be ridiculous, some people have better and faster reflexes too, fence with what you have.” At any rate, the redhead in the Twilight previews looks like the one in my long ago dream. (See, it got around to fencing)

I have of course had other fencing dreams. None of me winning major events, or becoming a champion or anything of the sort. In fact, usually the main thrust of the dream is something else and the fencing is going on sort of in the back ground. These dreams reflect my background in fencing too in that they never seem to take place in large fancy salles or arenas. Instead they are almost always in crowded school gyms or dimly lit decrepit clubs. I n one dream I recall the building was flooded, and the fencers had all piled their equipment bags around the strips to form dikes. The strips were wet but off the strip you were standing in three or four inches of cold water. I recall some discussion about the possibility of being electrocuted by the scoring equipment if you were fencing in puddles. So yes folks, I literally do fence in my sleep too.

So, do any of you have fencing dreams?