Every time USA Fencing publishes a schedule, a huge portion of parents start complaining, both about event days and event start time. I’m among these complainers.

We don’t like anything: why does this age group event end at night and the next age group event start at 8am the next day? How are our fencers supposed to recover? And why is there such unfairness toward West Coast fencers who need to compete at East Coast competitions starting at 8am? For us West Coasters, if a fencer needs to start fencing at 8am, they must be at the venue by 7am and wake up at 6am — that’s 3am in our home timezone! Isn’t this a form of torture?

For so many years USA Fencing bravely deflected online commentaries and questions, patiently repeating the same answers again and again: “the system is very complex, the scheduling is very complex, and there is nothing against West Coasters on a personal level.” And while we, parents and coaches, understand that the problems are indeed inherent in how the system works, we were never satisfied with the answers.

But things have finally changed!

USA Fencing has listened to the complaints and unhappiness of the fencing families and designed a new process behind the scenes. As I was part of the working group of this new process, I’m happy to announce that the new scheduling system is ready and will be introduced as soon as the upcoming new season!

So what will it be, in a nutshell?

When a fencer registers for a national event at usafencing.org, each event will have an additional checkbox with desired start times, ranging from 8am to 2pm: 8am, 9am, 10am, 11am, 12pm, 1pm, 2pm, and a special option “I don’t care.” The fencer will choose both the event and the desired hour.

The magic will happen on the backend of the system. When the regular fee deadline has passed — which means that about 98% of the fencers have signed up — the backend algorithm will run its calculations, using a set of different criteria.

Of course, I’m not at liberty to disclose the full algorithm, as this is a proprietary development belonging to USA Fencing, but I can tell you about some of the parameters that play into its decisions:

1. Fencers who participate in more events have more weight for their preferences. This makes sense — USA Fencing wants to accommodate first and foremost the fencers who compete on more days in this tournament, since the optimization of their start times matters more than the optimization for a fencer who came for a single event.
   
2. Fencers who are higher ranked in their age group also have more weight. If you think about it, this also makes sense, even if at first glance it is less obvious. The higher-ranked fencers are the ones most likely to fence deep into the day, which means their start time has a cascading effect on the entire event schedule.
   
3. Geographical distribution. Obviously, it would be impossible to move all events to start at 11am, as we West Coasters would prefer. So the algorithm must be much smarter than a simple majority vote. It balances time zone representation across the field to ensure that no single region is systematically disadvantaged — which, as we all know, has been the core complaint for years.
   
4. Weapon priority. For example, sabre is a faster-running event than epee and thus carries a different weight. A sabre event that starts late can still finish on time, while an epee event of the same size needs a significantly earlier start to avoid running into the late night.
   
5. Size of the event is taken into account as well. A Y10 event with 80 fencers has very different scheduling needs than a Junior event with 350.
   

The system is currently under intensive testing and will be rolled out in time for the October NAC.

After the initial rollout, the algorithm will be extended to provide a probability estimate of your selected start slot at the time of registration. So you will see that if you choose, for example, an 11am start, the probability of this being the actual start time is, say, 80%. This will give you an excellent sense of travel planning and allow you to match your competition schedule to your biological clock.

As always, we love it when new developments happen in USA Fencing and the organization listens to its membership’s voice. This is a significant step forward for the sport, and I’m proud to have been part of the effort.

We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.