Youth fencing brings with it youth referees, an aspect of our sport that’s good all the way round.
As a fencing father and a fencing event organizer, I’ve watched as beginner and young fencing referees work their way through calling matches. They start officiating at tournaments at a very young age, down to age twelve and sometimes even to age ten! That’s a fantastic thing as it develops referees, it develops fencers, it instills confidence, and so much more. Handing over a match to a young fencer shows them that the adults in their life trust them to make smart, level headed decisions.
Making mistakes is a part of life. Refs at the national level make mistakes. Refs at the Olympic level make mistakes. However a lack of experience means that young refs make more mistakes than those veterans with years of calling matches under their belt. What’s more, young refs tend to make the same kinds of mistakes again and again. While we can’t instantly give our young fencing referees years of experience with a snap of the fingers, we can teach them how to remedy their most common mistakes by mastering fencing referee skills.
Note that when we talk about these important fencing referee skills, we aren’t talking about the details of technical decisions and rules. Those are aspects of being a ref that young fencers should go to their coaches and mentors to deal with. Instead these are guidelines for all of fencing refereeing that exists outside of the technical aspects of the sport.
Once you have children, it’s never quite ever about you anymore. Your life revolves for the better (and rarely for the worse) around your child and their development into healthy, well functioning human beings. And most parents agree that all of this is not only worth it but immensely gratifying and even fun! Having what it takes to be a 
Let’s first of all be excited that a fencer is part of the standard emoji set! The fencer was added to Emoji 3.0 and Unicode 9.0 in 2016. What that means that this is a standard emoji that you can use everywhere no matter what your device. You can send the little fencer emoji to anyone and everyone in your contacts list not matter what you’re using OR they’re using. It shows how prominent fencing is becoming!
Fencing as a distinct form of combat goes all the way back to the 12