Art of Fencing, Art of Life

Month: May 2022

How Beginner Fencing Summer Camps Build Strong Kids

How Beginner Fencing Summer Camps Build Strong Kids

There’s a common idea that getting kids to go to beginner fencing summer camp is about creating the next generation of great fencers. 

It goes something like this:

  • A parent sees a flyer (or reads a blog) and thinks “Hey, this would be a great thing to try, and who knows? Maybe they’ll love it.”
  • The kid comes into the camp with wide eyes and picks up a sword, then they fall in love with fencing. 
  • Soon enough, they’re enrolled in classes and have found their passion for the sport. They start taking private lessons and competing.
  • Fast forward a dozen years and they’re marching in with the United States at the Olympics. 

Here’s the thing – beginner fencing camp isn’t about building the next generation of great fencers. Sure, we see kids jump into the sport after having done fencing summer camp and go on to become serious fencers, but that’s not at all what they come for. 

Here are five ways that beginner fencing camps build strong kids.

Driving in the rain and trusting your instincts

Driving in the rain and trusting your instincts

Let’s use an analogy that we all have experience with. Imagine you’re driving in the rain. The windshield wipers are fanning across the windshield furiously, with large drops plopping in your view so fast that the blades can barely keep up. Traffic is heavy and you’re having to watch out for cars that keep pulling past you. There’s that wiggly feeling under the steering wheel that tells you that the tires are barely gripping onto the asphalt. The glass in front of you oscillates between being clear and fogging up, so you have to keep turning the vent at the top of the dashboard on and off. 

This situation requires all of your focus and concentration. The people are driving fast past you, and you’re having to watch out for cars constantly. You know that you must point your attention to driving to keep the people in the car safe. 

Anyone who has been a driver for any amount of time will tell you that it all becomes automatic after a while. When you’re first driving, you worry about everything and overthink every turn of the steering wheel. With time, you don’t even think about it. You are just present in the moment and trusting your body and brain to react correctly. 

You learned to drive automatically by doing it again and again for many hours and in countless different situations – heavy, slow, or completely stalled traffic, different times of the day, from night moonless hours to bright days, you had been driving in the rain, snow or in many other weather and road conditions, you been in different cities or even countries, on 5-lanes highways to a poorly maintained country-side road, you had been driving different types of cars with different types of passengers, you had been driving being tired, sleepy, or angry, and many more variations.

In fencing, you have to learn to do that same thing. In the context of a fencing match, your brain is that person in the car. You have to learn to trust your body and brain to take over without you overthinking it. There is a constant talk in sports about “finding flow”. Dropping into the moment and being fully present during a match is a skill that’s developed over time and with a lot of training in different situations. It’s an important skill to develop because it allows us to maximize our mental agility without distraction and to bring our skills to the surface exactly when we need them.

41 Helpful Travel Tips for Fencing Competitions

41 Helpful Travel Tips for Fencing Competitions

Competitive fencing necessarily involves a good bit of travel. In that way, it’s like a lot of other youth sports. 

We’re a niche sport and one of its characteristics is that the distance between competing locally to competing regionally and then nationally is very short, unlike in such mainstream sports like tennis or basketball. Though we’re growing consistently over time and there are many local tournaments for fencers, growing in skills inevitably requires going to larger competitions, and competing at the regional and national levels will always involve a certain amount of travel.

Travel is shown to help kids become more adaptable and resilient, besides exposing them to different cultures and ways of living. Even domestic travel exposes kids to different cultures within the United States. Salt Lake City is not the same as Atlanta! The everyday life of people in various parts of the country is very different, and there’s nothing like visiting those places to help expand the worldview of young people.

Forty one travel tips for fencing families

Though we know that travel is great for kids, and we know that fencing competitions are a fantastic way to facilitate that travel, that doesn’t mean that it’s a walk in the park. Taking kids to competition, either by air or by road, is stressful for everyone. Luckily, there are things that we can do to mitigate that stress on kids and on parents. 

Maybe you’re an expert at traveling for fencing tournaments because you’ve been doing this for many years, or maybe you’re new to fencing and the excitement of traveling for competitions. Either way, you’ll find some new ideas here to help make the whole process easier and more enjoyable for everyone. 

Thanking mothers for doing what they do – everything

Thanking mothers for doing what they do - everything

There’s a little anecdote about mothers that’s been going around the internet for some time, and it pops up in many variations. It goes something like this:

When I was a child, my mother would always run back into the house when we were getting ready to leave for vacation. Everyone else was in the car, but she’d always go back and spend such a long time. I never could figure out what she was doing. 

Then, I became a mother and I realized what she was doing. 

Everything. 

She was doing everything.

Moms are the keepers of everything. There are a thousand little things that they take care of that kids and other adults even don’t see. They are the invisible hand that makes sure there’s always food in the pantry and the magical beings that poof birthday cakes out of nowhere. 

Need a pair of socks? Mom knows where to find them.

A snack in the middle of night when you wake up with a nightmare? Mom will pull one out of a hiding spot. 

Dropped a lump of burrito on your fencing jacket while eating between bouts at competition? Mom can get the stain out before the next round.

Knee scraped? Headache? Tummy troubles? Mom will come out with a solution to ease your ailments. 

It doesn’t matter where they are or what their child needs, moms always have a way of finding a solution. It’s why we come back to them again and again, not just as children but as adults, too. Though moms can’t fix all of the things in the world that are wrong, they do always offer us hope that there is a solution.

Just a Fencer in a White Jacket

A fencer in a white jacket

For the most part, the things in our lives only have as much power as we choose to give to them. When you face an opponent, you have options about how much weight you give to that opponent. 

What you bring to the match is not just about your skill and technique, it’s also very much about how you perceive your opponent. If you think that it’s impossible to win against an opponent because they are bigger, stronger, faster, and more experienced than you are, then you’re probably going to lose. Even if they are all of those things, you’re not going to fare any better against them because you focus on those dimensions.

On the other hand, if you can disentangle your perception of the opponent from the actions that you’re taking, you have a much better chance of winning against them. Even if you don’t win, you’ll have a much better bout that shows your skills and in which you level up. 

The physical component to fencing and athletics in general is certainly important, but the mental component is a driving factor of the physical reality. One goal that we must have in fencing is to control the automatic response that our body and brain has to the outside stimulation. In this case, we’re thinking of a much better opponent as that outside stimulation. 

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