One of the biggest confusions among parents is figuring out how to get their child to qualify for Fencing Summer Nationals in the United States. And the main reason – the qualification path changes every year! Not only will your child change in age category and start to attend older age brackets, but they also might go even further and start attending senior level divisions. Add to this that USFA qualification rules are constantly changing, sometimes quite significantly, and it’s no wonder that parents are confused.
The USFA provides all of the information about the qualification path (e.g., check out Athlete Handbook), but that information is quite advanced for novice parents and scattered throughout the manuscript. The Research Triangle Fencing club in North Carolina did a fantastic job in creating a one page reference, which we think is really amazing. Yet, parents are still confused.
In the discussions with parents I often use a drawing that explain to them how their child could qualify, and then an idea came to my mind – create an infographic that will explain how to qualify for Fencing Summer Nationals in one place and in really laymen’s terms.
Here it is!
You can use it any way you want – there is an online version on Piktochart (a tool with which this infographic was created – btw, highly recommended!), and as well you can download this pdf for your purposes. The benefits of online version is that it has a “Present” button on the right corner and you can use it to display the image page by page for each age category (from youth to seniors), which makes it a good tool for presentation.
Good luck with qualifying to US Fencing Summer Nationals and looking forward to seeing you there!
Ana
Another awesome, super helpful post!! You guys are the best! One quick question: For the Y14 bracket, how exactly do you get on the NRPS? Do you need to place within a specific percentage at a national tournament? Thanks!!
Igor Chirashnya
Hi Ana,
Thanks! To earn national points one needs to finish in top 40% in national level event, such as SYC, NAC or Nationals, in either one’s own age bracket or one above.
Stay tuned – we will publish respective post soon.
Igor.