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...
A kid walks to the strip and tells his parents, "I should win this." Twenty minutes later he walks back, mask under his arm, and says, "I could have won it." I have heard this pair so many times that I stopped counting. And every time, I know the bout was lost...
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....
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...
A few months ago I wrote about reputation in fencing, about how every fencer is building one, whether they realize it or not, with every bout, every call, every small choice nobody is grading them on. Honesty is where that reputation is actually made or lost. Not the...
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...
Summer Nationals 2026 in Portland is almost here. If you are a parent heading to your first national-level fencing competition, you are probably feeling a mix of excitement and nerves. After helping hundreds of families through their first nationals over the years, I...
USA Fencing just announced a change to the domestic points system. Call it anything other than seismic and you are underselling it. Here is their announcement: A Simpler Path Through the Sport This is a major change in how American domestic fencing is run, and it will...
You need to appreciate that the only thing you will never have in abundance is your time. You can have money, and with time you can earn interest on it, multiply it, invest it. But time is something that is absolutely finite, and with each passing moment each of us...
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...
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