Academy of Fencing Masters Blog

High school is no walk in the park for anyone. For almost everyone who’s lived through the ups and downs of high school, it’s a challenging time. There are transitions, there’s pressure. Young people suddenly feel the weight of adulthood coming for them, and the world itself gets more real than it ever has been before. College and choices are coming, and teenagers are just dipping their toes into making some of those huge decisions.  What it really boils down to is that there are...

Fencing Summer Nationals and July Challenge 2022 is fast approaching - in fact, it’s almost here!  Part of the magic of Fencing Summer Nationals is that it happens in a different city every year. Those cities provide opportunities for exploration and learning in new places, but it also means fencers and fencing families have to get their feet under them in a new city with a new venue every year. The learning curve is part of the fun, but preparation can help the whole thing go much...

In the center of the parking lot at our fencing club in Sunnyvale, there’s a cement sidewalk that’s about two and a half feet wide, separating the neatly parked rows of cars, a sort of thin line in the middle of the wide asphalt area.  If I were to take one of our fencing classes out into the parking lot and ask them to run up and down that strip of concrete, they’d jump up and go do it easily. In fact, during the height of the pandemic when we were doing a lot of outside practice,...

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...

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...