It’s obvious that parents want to do what’s best for their child. That’s the point of parenting isn’t it? But the answer to helping your child definitely isn’t in doing everything for them. And it definitely isn’t in leaving them to do everything themselves. Now what you’ve got to figure out is how you can balance the two.
You need a guide to help you know how to foster independence and fulfill those needs. Luckily we just so happen to have one.
Most of us have heard of Maslow’s hierarchy. If you haven’t, don’t worry, we’re going to to talk about what it is and how fencing parents can use it.
American fencing is on a winning streak. You can feel it when you watch our top fencers vie for the top medals at worldwide competitions and win. That’s happening more and more every year, enough to call it more than a fluke, more than a lucky athlete here and there who made it to the top of an international podium. What we’re seeing is a swell of American fencing talent that’s been built over decades, in fits and starts but always with a trend towards a greater goal.
You only have to look at the Olympic medal counts that start at zero for broad decades in the early Twentieth Century, then trickle in with a podium here and there, then flood the stage starting with women’s sabre in the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. The changes over the last two decades from zero to quasi-hero are really impossible to miss!
It doesn’t matter if you follow epee, foil, or sabre, you can rest assured that there are American fencers of both genders pushing the boundaries against the fencing powerhouses of Europe, Asia, and the former Soviet bloc. If you’re reading this, then I’m probably not telling you anything new. You know that American fencing has been moving forward at a breakneck pace in the last twenty years. It might seem as though that’s a meteoric rise, however it’s anything but. American fencing has been building this ladder for a long time.
You get out of your fencing practice what you put into it. We all know that. We also all know that you get out of your body what you put into it.
Put in good hard work into your fencing and you’ll get good results on the strip.
Put good food into your body and you’ll get good results out of your body.
But what is good food? We’ve all heard about how you should be focused on your calorie intake when you’re in intensive training for a competition. Olympic athletes eat rigid regimens in the months before qualification and of course before the games themselves. However we fencers aren’t training for big competitions all the time. Even regular season fencing competitions are relatively sporadic – one or two per month. Eating good and healthy thru the day, especially when you have school and practice afterwards, is a whole different thing.
Who are your best teachers? We tend to put teachers in a box in a schoolhouse, with a blackboard and rows of desks. That’s a bit of a narrow definition if you think about it, because teachers are much more than that. Teachers come in all shapes and sizes, from our parents as our first teachers to our children as our teachers later on in life. If you’re a fencer, then your fencing teachers have a great influence on your development, one that we appreciate far beyond our time on the strip.
Behind every exceptional person
I recently finished reading Stephen Hawking’s book “Brief Answers to The Big Questions”, and in the last chapter he wrote:
“If you look behind every exceptional person there is an exceptional teacher. When each of us thinks about what we can do in life, chances are we can do it because of a teacher” (p.201)
Teaching someone is more than just telling someone how to do something. It’s a connection, a human bond that brings richness to the lives of both the student and the teacher. Teachers are transformative for the lives of their students.
Tokyo 2020 Olympic fencing qualification had started in April 2019. The major qualification path is team qualification for 24 positions, followed by individual qualification for the remaining 10 positions in each weapon and gender.
This infographic explains how fencers qualify for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.
For more detailed information about fencing qualification to Tokyo Olympic Games 2020 read our previous post.
In addition, you can download high resolution jpeg image here and pdf file here.
I hope you enjoy it and share with your fencing friends.
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