I don't blog much these days. Of all the things I have to say, half are related to students and not appropriate for public content, half I have no interest in telling the f.net community, and half are rambles.

Anyway, I was thinking about empathy and I have nowhere better to write about it than on here.

I'm convinced empathy is lacking from almost everywhere in the fencing world.* Coaches often don't have it for students. Refs don't have it for coaches. Head

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Obviously, I haven't been posting much in the past few months. Things in my fencing life have been going great, and I've never had much of an idea of what to say in a blog post. So I just haven't posted.

I have a new idea. As I'm being a competitive sabre fencer these days, I think I'm going to use my blog to document that part of my fencing career at the moment. Starting... NOW!!!


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Background, my junior year of college I

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As a coach or fencer, I don't really care what a referee calls. I might prefer 1 way or another, but if he or she is consistent, I can deal with it. Maybe he's calling things crazy tight, or crazy loose, whatever. If he's consistent, I can deal with it, regardless of how non-nonsensical it is.

As a referee, you're always told to make every call correctly. If you miss 1, to just make the next one correctly. Don't make a bad call, then try to be consistent with that mistake. This

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It makes blogging annoying...

That said, I don't even know when my last post was. Whenever it was, things here have been CRAZY. To sum up, for complicated reasons, the club where I have been working is forced to close, and my co-coach / roommate and I have decided to form a new club in the ashes of what we used to have. We have a space / club, we have 80 paying members that support us, support of some of the top coaches in the country, support of the USFA, and a dedication and

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I was at a reasonably strong regional event recently where it was me and one other ref around my level, and a handful of solid, but less experienced refs, and a BC that is not too familiar with the way big events are run. Not a knock against any of these guys, they just have a different set of experiences and expectations than I do. This is nothing new to me, as I've been in that boat many times, as I'm sure most other NAC refs have been when they go to ref locally.

I had an experience

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