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Academy of Fencing Masters Blog

Art of Fencing, Art of Life

NEW Fencing Competition Service! Gear & Tournament Delivery Makes Competition Easy for Families & Fencers

NEW Fencing Competition Service! Gear & Tournament Delivery Makes Competition Easy for Families & Fencers

Coming soon for the 2022-23 fencing season is a fantastic fencing competition service that will support competitive fencers like never before.  The hassle and struggle of carting gear back and forth to the venue, all while making sure it’s clean, sanitized, and in working order, is one of the toughest things about the life of a competitive fencer. It distracts from the focus that competitors can have on competition, and it’s a big stress on fencing families.  The new Gear &...

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Do’s and Don’ts of Parental Disappointment in Fencing

Do’s and Don’ts of Parental Disappointment in Fencing

A powerful nature scene showing tumultuous ocean waves hitting a rocky coastline under ominous stormy skies Every sports parent has been in this situation. You take your child to fencing practice, you support them, you work with them, you see their growth and you are so excited to watch them compete. They’ve been growing and changing, and it’s a great feeling!  You’ve been talking to them about their growth in fencing, listening as they tell you about their newest skills in parrying or...

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Daring Greatly – The Man in the Arena

Daring Greatly – The Man in the Arena

On a recent quiet night, I found myself reading a book by Michael Dell called Play Nice but Win, in which he quoted Theodore Roosevelt. Though I stumbled upon this quote many years ago, for some reason it resonated with me in a different way than before.  It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and...

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Letting Go of the Pressure that Comes with a New Fencing Rating

Letting Go of the Pressure that Comes with a New Fencing Rating

The moment when a fencer gets a new rating is an exciting one. After working hard and continuing to grow, they finally push past their old rating and up to the next level.  Like anything in sport, or anything in life, a rating captures a single moment in time. It’s a marker of where someone was on the day that the rating was granted. Because that rating follows fencers, being put next to their name and being used to seed them for competition, it can feel like it’s part of their identity....

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Fencing Summer Nationals Qualifications for Cadet, Juniors, and Divisions 1A, 2, 3, & Youth

Fencing Summer Nationals Qualifications for Cadet, Juniors, and Divisions 1A, 2, 3, & Youth

There is always some question about the path to the national fencing competition. This is especially true during the spring, as fencers start to need to do the math to figure out what they have to do to qualify. This time of year, we always have parents and fencers asking us about their qualification status for Fencing Summer Nationals.  To make your way from a competitor who wants to compete to a qualified candidate, you have to figure out three things: How to qualify (the process for...

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We Must Stand United Against Injustice in Ukraine

We Must Stand United Against Injustice in Ukraine

Humanity must stand strong in the face of oppression. Humanity must win. Good must prevail over evil. These are not just words, they are words with meaning and depth. We are sitting at a crisis point in which the world has to stand united against injustice. The fencing community is a global one, even as we are each in our own individual clubs across the world. What’s happening in Ukraine is affecting our global community. An immoral war calls for us to speak out Standing strong means publicly...

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Why You Aren’t Done When You Get to the Top of the Mountain

Why You Aren’t Done When You Get to the Top of the Mountain

It’s very difficult to climb the mountain. It’s very easy to fall down. I recently had the privilege of seeing a fencer get his A-rating. It’s a long, hard road that goes over a lot of years to get to this point, and it’s a huge accomplishment. There’s a feeling about this achievement that is something akin to getting to the top of a mountain, because it’s a long way up! It’s hard not to look at how far you’ve come up to this point and not marvel at the height of it.  What happens when...

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Principles of Pool Assignments

Principles of Pool Assignments

There’s something mysterious about the way that fencing pool assignments happen. To uninitiated it’s can feel like a hidden secret that no one really understands. It doesn’t have to be confusing or frustrating though!  Fencing competitions are not a straight line from start to finish. To narrow the competitors from a wide group to the finalists, there are two layers of competition - the pool rounds and the direct elimination rounds. Everyone knows that there are two parts, but what we’re...

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Patience in Fencing: Everything Takes Longer than You Think

Patience in Fencing: Everything Takes Longer than You Think

Person holding a vintage pocket watch with the face visible, evoking a sense of time and nostalgia Everything in fencing takes longer than you think it will. Just as we have to practice footwork and hand position until we get it, we also have to practice patience. One virtue that you need more than almost any other in fencing is patience.  The first big jump There is the initial feeling of mastery that comes from just picking up the sword. You go from never having held a fencing sword,...

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Using Small Tactical Breaks to Break Your Opponent’s Flow

Using Small Tactical Breaks to Break Your Opponent’s Flow

Fencers build up an impressive toolkit through experience and constant learning. There’s a cache of potential proactive and reactive movements that we have stored in our mental files that we pull out to try to beat our opponent. What happens when you’ve used up all of those files? What happens when you get caught off guard and don’t know how to respond to your opponent effectively at all? What happens when you just run out of ideas? Fencing matches go so quickly. Did you know that it’ll take...

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Is Fencing an Expensive Sport?

Is Fencing an Expensive Sport?

Fencing has a reputation for being an expensive sport. People often think that it is an elite sport that is too far out of the reach of many families. It’s one of the aspects of fencing that holds it back from becoming more mainstream. This reputation is not necessarily well deserved, but then information is power in all things. And so I decided to write a blog that gives parents and fencers a good perspective on the expenses roadmap. It is incredibly important to note that these are...

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Cool Runnings Again: Beating the Unbeatable

Cool Runnings Again: Beating the Unbeatable

After 24 years, the Jamaican four-man bobsled team has at last qualified for the Winter Olympics again.  When I saw the Jamaican bobsled team in the 1988 Winter Olympic Games, I was completely in awe of their story. It stuck with me through the years, continuing to inspire me whenever it ran across my mind. A couple of days ago, the story of the new four man bobsled team from Jamaica making the Winter Olympics popped up while I was watching the news on TV, and I was suddenly inspired all over...

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18 Tips for First Time Fencing Parents

18 Tips for First Time Fencing Parents

Every parent thinks about what their child will want to participate in when they get old enough for extracurricular activities. Around the age from seven to ten, kids are generally old enough to start exploring the wide world of activities outside of their family and school in a serious way. Whether it's the arts like theatre and orchestra, youth organizations like scouting or 4-H Club, or any number of youth sports, keeping kids busy is part of keeping them growing in the right direction. ...

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Accepting the New Reality of COVID

Accepting the New Reality of COVID

Especially given the recent developments and mutations in the COVID virus, it seems clear that this pandemic will be a part of our lives for the future ahead of us and is de facto a new reality. We’ll have to get used to it, just as we are used to the flu or chickenpox. COVID is fundamentally different from any other kind of endemic that we are used to, so the future will have to look different than anything we’ve seen before. That goes for the future of school, the future of work, and the...

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How to Impress Your Fencing Coach with Your Mental Attitude

How to Impress Your Fencing Coach with Your Mental Attitude

If you think that the only thing that would impress your fencing coach is your medals, you will be disappointed. The greatest fencing coaches are not impressed by fencers who win medals and show their power on the strip. The greatest fencing coaches are impressed by fencers who know how to use their minds and their focus effectively to improve their fencing.  The physicality of the body is always driven by the mastery of the mind and the emotions. You could be the fastest, most flexible,...

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