Academy of Fencing Masters Blog

Charisse Nixon, a psychology professor at Penn State Behrend, ran a simple exercise in her classroom. It showed, in a few minutes, something I have been telling parents at our club for years, usually without much success. She handed out a sheet with three words. The task: rearrange the letters of each word to make a new word, and raise your hand as soon as you solve it. What the students didn't know was that the class got two different sheets. The first half received the word BAT, and the...

A father of a beginner asked me last week how long it would take his daughter to become a very good fencer. “ What do you mean by becoming a good fencer?” I asked. The father shrugged. “Well, winning national medals and being recruited.” I asked him a question back. If she picked up a violin tomorrow, how long before she’s good enough to sit in the Vienna Philharmonic? He laughed. “Years,” he said. “Maybe never.” Well, then… Fencing is one of the hardest sports to master. Timing, distance,...

I read a post recently about yoga. Except, of course, it was not really about yoga. The author described falling out of poses over and over in class. She said that naturally her inner sense of balance isn't that good and to help her, her teacher had given her one instruction: pick a point, focus and keep your eyes there. And while she knew this, she still couldn't stop looking aside and kept glancing sideways at the person next to her, trying to see how they were holding it together. Every...

Being one of the largest clubs in the country, we receive hundreds of emails every week. Parents, fencers, coaches, and the club all need to talk about billing, scheduling, health, training plans, competitions, logistics, equipment, and a hundred other things. With that much email flying around, how well we communicate matters just as much as what we're communicating about. Email etiquette is a trivial topic, I know. But after years of running the club, I decided it was worth writing down. Not...

Today I had a conversation that went badly wrong. I said something that landed as a personal attack. It was not intended as one. What I actually felt, what I was actually reacting to, lived in a register the other person had no access to. I was transmitting on a frequency he weren't tuned to. And I didn't realize it until the damage was done. This happens in fencing constantly. There is a moment every fencing coach knows. A referee makes a call. A parent says something in the hallway. A...

I recently reviewed Andre Agassi's autobiography Open on this blog, and the response was significant. Many fencing parents told me they picked up the book because of that review. That's great — it's an extraordinary memoir that every sports parent should read. But I'm worried that some parents took away the wrong lesson. Here's what some of them heard: Agassi's father was relentless, demanding, borderline abusive in his single-minded obsession with making his son a champion — and it worked....

There's a moment that happens at almost every competition I attend. A fencer comes off the strip after a loss. Before she even has time to take off her mask, her parent is already there: "Why didn't you finish your attack when she was at the back line? You had the moment! And that last touch — you should have parried instead of counter-attacking." The fencer's eyes go flat. She nods, says nothing, and walks away to pack her bag. The parent thinks they've just helped. They haven't. They've just...