Peach

Spencer supremacy

, 01-27-2009 at 04:10 PM (59 Views)

Haven't been updating lately because I just haven't been as driven since my mother died.

The fencing group at school continues to be awesome. Danny won the practice tournament I held. It turns out that I can practice in part of the gym when one of the basketball groups has a game. The coach at Haverford College was hard to get hold of, so we've been practicing outside or in the upstairs hall, so I'm glad to add the gym to our list of rotating venues.

Today I had them do the lunge relay race, had them practice hitting one another on the head, and then had a game Spencer invented called "Spencer supremacy." I have 16 boys, so I divided them into four teams of four. If you are hit by someone not on your team, you are dead and must go sit on the bleachers; if you are killed once, after you sit on the bleachers you may re-enter the field, but after your second death you're truly dead. If you go outside the arbitrary lines, you are also dead. Danny, who inevitably is one of the last boys alive in any game like this, added the rule that "you are not allowed to jab Danny repeatedly." He was one of the last two in this game, too, though Spencer won, which meant it was indeed "Spencer supremacy."

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Comments

Fencergrl - 01-30-2009 03:19 PM
I like introducing my kid fencers to new fun games so I have a couple questions about the game.
1) are the kids using the whole gym? If not what are the boundaries?
2) How is it determined when a "one-time dead" player can go back in the game? When another team mate "dies"? A time limit?
Peach - 01-30-2009 06:39 PM
1. They're using a quarter of the gym, and only sometimes. Basically, I practice wherever there's room. Today I practiced in the hallway* When it's not too messy outside, I practice outside. Anyway, with games, I try to keep the boundaries small enough so that things don't get boring--I generally pace the lines before a game starts so that they see where the boundaries are.
2. I use various methods of death. In the case of "Spencer Supremacy," you had to go sit on the bleachers before you could come alive again, and you could only enter at a certain spot. Several of the boys decided to die once and then bide their time until many of their opponents had been killed off, and then re-entered the field (only to discover that their opponents also had only died once). Today, in "Pirates and Spaniards," one of the boys pretended to be dead so that he could attack his opponents from behind after they passed him.

*Middle school sports are definitely lower on the totem pole than upper school sports, and fencing is not even funded by the athletics department--our minuscule budget comes out of the middle school activities fund. Our AD doesn't even want to add fencing as a sport school wide because he doesn't really have room in our huge new field house. So we fence wherever someone else isn't practicing at the time. Even the hallway is disputed ground because the crew team likes to set up their rowing machines there.