Long day at the Junior Varsity Fencing Championships yesterday

Had a marathon of a fencing day yesterday, 6 am to 8:30pm. We took the new Lowell team (this is our first season) to the Junior Varsity Championships in Winnetka and we fielded 3 squads at the tournament. Boys saber, boys foil and girls foil. We were unable to fill a girls saber team do to some last minute issues.

My saber squad came in 5th out of 9, which was a great finish. Both the boys and girls foil squads came in 7th out of 11 in their divisions. Again very solid results.

5th and 7th may not seem very good to most people but we have the newest team and all of our fencers are new to the sport. Every team that beat my saber squad is at least 10 years old, every team but ours has paid coaches, every team has a full varsity teams to help train the JV squads, most of the teams ahead of us also have year round club programs, etc etc etc! My most experienced saber fencers have no more than 6 months of experience, and most of them have about 3 months experience. We have no Varsity level kids to help raise our skill level in practice bouts bad we don't even have a budget to repair broken equipment so I cobble together cords and blades with scavenged parts and try to get as much time getting them to learn more advanced techniques while still stressing the basics.

Our Foil coach is similarly a volunteer and does her best with her squads, old equipment, and inexperienced fencers.

Honestly I'm thrilled with the results from the tournament.

Oh, and I'm an assistant for the Marian Catholic team and all three Lowell squads beat their respective Marian squads too!

Sounds good Bob. Hope all the kids had a great time!

Like my son's soccer team, they're there for experience, fun and to make them better players. Victories will come to them in due time.

The kids actually got some nice victories. In Saber they outright defeated 3 of the teams, and by point scores and individual victories ended up surpassing a 4th team. Even the teams that defeated our kids, we had some individual victories.

The format was 9 individual bouts against every other team. In boys saber there were 9 teams. In foil there were 11 teams. Everyone fenced everyone else. So it took 5 individual bout victories to make a team victory, then team victories were added up to determine team placement. In the event of a tie, individual victories were counted as the tie breakers.

Defeat and failure build character ... something the public schools are starting to relearn. Thankfully, the concept of building character and self esteem thru the "everyone gets a ribbon" days are over.

Congrats to your saber and fencing teams! Just wait 'til next year!

Kane said:

Defeat and failure build character ... something the public schools are starting to relearn. Thankfully, the concept of building character and self esteem thru the "everyone gets a ribbon" days are over.

Congrats to your saber and fencing teams! Just wait 'til next year!

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Thanks. The season is actually only at the midpoint. While the JV Championships were yesterday, the varsity season continues until Feb 22nd. Our fencers, despite their modest ability, will be competing for the entire season against the better, faster, more skilled varsity fencers.

There are tournaments virtually every weekend except next weekend. Most of them are varsity level. One or two of them are JV level. But we will attend every one. Taking our lumps along the way, hopefully learning as we go too.

bczoom said:

Sounds good Bob. Hope all the kids had a great time!

Like my son's soccer team, they're there for experience, fun and to make them better players. Victories will come to them in due time.

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Sounds great.