As I spend more time coaching, I am more and more convinced that students best learn through games, not drills. I am lucky to have had an early coaching education that really emphasized games, but I can also see the weaknesses of that curriculum, most notably where it moved away from being game-based and became more drill-based. So now I'm a little bit obsessed with what defines games and how to turn those less interesting drills into games.

There's a book that came out a week or

Read More

Dear Qatet,

You were an idiot this semester. You drove yourself too hard. You're right, this is probably your last year of having this freedom to get out in the world this much, but you're not able to mentally take advantage of it at the moment. Your goal for next semester is to learn to say no.

I reffed Milwaukee - my first NAC in years, although I reffed at Nationals this last summer. It clarified a couple things in my head, and was overall a good experience.

On the nuts and bolts front, there are a couple calls that I was not as good at and now see pretty well, particularly "attack stops, attack arrives." I'm still not quite sure how exactly to physically phrase that when I say it to the fencers, since there's no signal for "stops." I can either

Read More

I have never in my life returned from a tournament - any tournament, much less a NAC - to feel so thoroughly uninterested in fencing. Coaching is fine, and I'm ending up turning all of my bouts into lessons at the moment. It's a new feeling, though, and not a particularly welcome one. Usually I come back hungry, scarcely able to wait to get back in the swing of things, even from local tournaments.

Part of this is surely because I was never really in the swing of things before Cincinnati.

Read More

I fenced Div II yesterday. Sort of. I knew going into it that it was primarily an excuse to spend my weekend in the venue - it seems too silly to fly acorss the country simply to watch and listen, but quite normal to do so to fence, even if only in an event for which one is feeling neither prepared nor enthusiastic. (Shhhh... it makes sense in my head...) I currently have the time and money to do things like this, though, and I know that these opportunities will be few and far between soon

Read More