Reffed a mixed C/Under foil event yesterday morning, and then the mixed epee in the afternoon. (My apologies to anyone who spent last night cursing me out.) World of difference between my comfort level on those two. I'm sure a lot of it has to do with having DONE the epee reffing before (not to mention the fact that epee is sometimes a whole lotta nothing till something catastrophic occurs). But also, I'm just. Not. Comfortable. With foil reffing. Yet. And apparently, it showed. Overall – how did I do? Not great, but not bad. Blah. I don’t like doing just OK.

As my observers, M and W both had the same feedback for me on foil. I made *mostly* good calls - and the majority of the bad ones were beginner mistakes of blade actions. Most common was with an unconventional fencer who tended to counter-attack then close off really fast, so it looked like a parry, hence his touch. But in reality, if it had only registered in my brain that the blade contact occurred a fraction of a second after the touch, I'd have grokked what had happened. But it was loud. And I was stressed. And frankly, I'm not used to people *doing* that action, so I wasn’t expecting it. It's just... well... wrong. But it bit me. Also, there were a couple of beat-vs.-parry problems. Who knew foilists beat so often? I’ve mostly seen women’s foil in action, and this was NOT women’s foil. Otherwise, the calls were mostly OK – though there were enough suspected mistakes to keep me awake half the night, obsessing over whether I blew an entire bout for someone, and thus blew that person’s stats and maybe messed up the rest of the tournament for the person… Maybe I’m taking too much responsibility for my actions by feeling that way, but it seems to me that that’s preferable to not giving a crap. I would like to think that the people who ref me care. They probably don’t, but that’s not to say they shouldn’t.

Mostly, what was lacking in my foil reffing was confidence. To paraphrase M, if he'd asked most of the fencers in my pool how I was doing, they would have said mezza-mezza. Not because of the calls themselves, but because I wasn't owning the strip the way I need to. Such tentative reffing made it seem like I wasn't certain of the calls - even though I usually was. I should exude confidence. I... didn't. Also, my hand signals sort of fell off, particularly when I was trying to reconstruct some of the more complex actions. He told me that if you get just that last action down from the brain, and use those signals, the words will follow. True, I was having no trouble *seeing* whose touch it was (OK - usually), but articulating when reconstructing the phrase still makes me have to slow down and work it out. Hand signals would help, again. Jeez, I spend half my life trying to break myself of my habit of talking with my hands, and now I have to go and do it on purpose?

His best suggestion was this: "You need to ref more bad foil." In other words, show up on foil nights and just ref. I'll see all sorts of crazy, bad fencing. I’ve done this a couple of times already, but I admit that I need to do it more. And since I aspire to be as good a ref as M someday (unlikely in this lifetime), I’d best get my act together fast.

Epee-wise, not a lot of weirdness going on. With only 10 fencers, we triple-stripped and got through it fast. Didn’t throw a single card, and only had to enforce the ground penalty a few times. Other than one bout where something genuinely weird happened with the timer, it was business as usual. My biggest stress was early on, not realizing that the touch counter was going up automatically with each touch – which it didn’t do with foil Doh! I caught on pretty fast. ?

I bagged the sabre event for the day. Only a few people showed up, and two others showed up to ref. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to see straight by then, and didn't want to be observed while mentally fried. That, and the fact that I suddenly had unexpected dinner guests waiting for me in my house.