My name is Chris. I am the co-founder of the GMU fencing team, for which I currently serve as the coach, and the captain, The crazy part is that im only 20, and I am not a very accomplished fencer. I referee (alot) because I need the money and I enjoy it. Im becoming a better referee than I am fencer, by far.
So I am going to try to use this blog to document and follow my development as a referee, from local schmo, into hopefully, an international level ref...
Got home from Des Moine monday night. Have since written 2 paper (a 6 and a 4 page paper), and will be cramming for an exam tonight that I sit for tomorrow. 2 more months of college, then I'm done. Argh, I have sooooo little drive to do any work.
On a side note, I think while I was in Des Moines, cupid started doing heroine. 2 different 3+ year relationships among my friends ended over the weekend. One of my friends just started dating the biggest tool I know (not just among
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A post in the most recent NjSux thread prompted me to write this. Not quite worthy of a thread, but im interested in hearing other people's thoughts.
In my experience, I have never been to an event with biased referees.* I find alot of people think some events tend to have biased refs, but I've never seen it to be true. I think there are 2 things that lead to problems.
1) When a club hosts an event and hires its own coaches or fencers to referee it, those refs will have a very similar
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This is something I started really thinking about while I was at coaches college, and what are advantages and disadvantages of both of them.
There is 1 clear nice advantage of an inverse advance. That is that you can take that first half step with the back foot, and then decide if you want to finish it as an advance or a lunge. This is a very nice thing for foil or sabre.
After thinking about it more for a few days, I don't see much advantage of it at all in epee. So much of epee is short
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Well, I was in the middle of drafting this whole big blog entry about thoughts based on inverse advance vs. advance (and I'm still working on it).
However, I've had a rather big development in my life in the mean time thats probably worth sharing. I just got a job in California as a full time coach. I went out there for a week at the end of summer on a trial run, and everything went great. I got a job offer from the owner a few days ago. Its absolutely awesome...
The dominant thinking on F.Net seems to be that lessons should be very bout realistic, which very few artificial cues. The coach should always be doing footwork, and making realistic actions. This is the way the majority of my lessons have been of late. Especially with footwork, I very rarely walk out a lesson, I'm usually doing footwork.
In California, a coach asked me a question I hadn't given alot of thought to before. "How do you make sure you're not teaching your students to fence C
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Ya know, its not often in life that you get a 2nd chance at something.
So often something happens, but you're never faced with the same thing. You can learn from your mistakes, and try not to remake them. However, you're often applying the facts of 1 situation to a very different situation.
This is not the case for me right now. I had an opportunity about 3 years ago, and I made a choice that ended up being quite wrong. I learned from it, I vowed never to do something that stupid ag
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New Jersey up to Boston (ref Pomme): 283 miles
Back to NJ from Pomme: 283 miles
NJ to chicago (connecting flight):762 miles
Chicago to Dallas (nationals): 970 miles
Dallas to Chicago (connecting flight): 762 miles
Chicago to Washington DC (Hang out with friends after nationals): 701 miles
DC back to NJ: 197 miles
NJ to Charlottesville VA (Michael Marx Clinic): 359 Miles
Back to NJ: 359 miles
NJ to Rangeley Maine (Summer house): 503 miles
Maine to Colorado Springs (Coaches college): 21
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As I said in my last blog, I've been thinking alot about coaching, and things to do that would take elements from multiple of the coaches I've interacted with this summer. So I wrote a lesson and posted it in this entry.
My coach often does a variation off of the same drill. Student is attacking, and will finish with a set number of disengages with a lunge. Say its 1 disengage. Initially the student with make advance with feint (starting from a normal engarde), and lunge on the coaches s
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So I've been spending most of my summer either at my club, Clinton Fencing Club, or at one of Mr. Ma's clubs, taking and watching alot of lessons from both coaches, Eric Bowden and Mr. Ma respectively. Then I spent this past weekend at the foil coaching clinic with Michael Marx down in VA.
All 3 coaches have a very very different method of teaching fencing. I'm still mentally working through all of it, and processing it. Because what they do is so dramatically different, I think there is
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Its funny, I've been looking forward to summer nationals for a long time, because its been like 9 months since reffing a NAC. But now that its almost here, my drive has gone way down. The combination of sucking the last time I reffed* and there being some things here in NJ that I really don't want to leave at the moment.
Gah! Of course that's the way life goes. Ah well, it should be interesting 1 way or another...
*Day 2 at pomme, I started off fine, then when I got moved to womens, I
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10-14-2009 09:47 PM 
