Statistics and play by play from US-Russia team sabre.

[sabreur]

I was thinking about taking a poll to see how many people were sick of polls.

That's one of the things that stopped me....

[Foilling Around]

On a related subject, thinking about fencing actions, I attach a form I give to my junior fencers on A5 card (just back to back it on A4 and cut it in half).

Even when I am at an event I cannot watch them all when I have 10+ fencers in different age groups.

It is not perfect and it is designed for foil but it does make them think about the whole event from arrival and warm up through to constructive post event self analysis.

[VorpalCat]

I was thinking about taking a poll to see how many people were sick of polls.

Careful, they might decide to start charging a fee every time someone reponsds to a poll and you know how unpopular poll taxes can be. (And no, you can't call me a poll cat. )

[Inquartata]

you know how unpopular poll taxes can be.

Not as unpopular as pollaxes...

[40Saberthieves]

I'm trying to make a quick-but-useful job of this, for the first draft.

Idea: A "bout worksheet." A person watching a bout can quickly record all actions, without having to rewind the video or ask the fencers to repeat what they did.

Conventions: Some icons and some text. After the first dozen actions, the sheet should be self-explanatory, so we don't want it weighted down with how-to's. Intuitive. Some text / icons will be gray, so the user can hurriedly mark over them (this will hurt photocopying). User can make their own conventions for using the worksheet.

Top of page:
Row 1: "BOUT SHEET", tournament name, date
Row 2: Weapon, Category (WS, MF, U-19 MF), Round (pool, 32, 16, 8...)
Row 3: Fencer left (+seed, country), Fencer right (+seed, country)

Row 4..n: The hard part, the per-action recording.

It will look a bit like this:

Split in two columns, actions from LEFT, actions from RIGHT.

(In the middle of the column split, a representation of the strip. User can hastily draw arrows showing starting/ending positions of fencers.)

(In the middle of the colunn split, a "(_) Simultaneous" box to show simul outcomes.)

On each side of column split (one for each fencer), the following inputs:

(_) Touch (touch awarded for this fencer?)
(_)(_) Lights (lights turned on)
(_) Target hit (representation of opposite fencer. Can be a dot (tip-hit), slash (cut), or a word ("wrist"))

Describing the actions -- user can put in one or more checkmarks for each section, to describe what happened from a fencer.

Foot actions: (just offensive, retreating is assumed)
(_) Short Attack
(_) Long attack
(_) March attack
(_) Attack à tempo
(_) Attack fell short

Hand actions:
Offensive
(_) Direct
(_) Prise du Fer (offensive bind, coulé &etc.)
(_) Beat
(_) Feint {size: Sm Med Lg Huge} {feint to: ______}
Defensive (e.g., against an attacker)
(_) PiL (point in line)
(_) Parry
(_) Riposte
(_) Closeout (bind)
(_) Stoptime (stop hit, countertime)
Hit type:
(_) Hit (standard tip-hit or cut)
(_) Flick
(_) au Fer (through steel, wraparound or insistence thru parry)
(_) Remise

Lastly, each action will have a comment section to the right of the page.

I have it mostly layed out, am I missing anything?

Just use oxford tactical notation.

[wflaschka]

Just use oxford tactical notation.

That's why I felt okay making the "comments" section so small -- otn compresses nicely, and I can do it pretty quickly. I'm probably the only person alive who uses it. But one goal is to be able to scan down the page and make a quick reckoning of how each fencer hit, and maybe put the totals at the bottom of the page. When I have draft3 ready (in a week) I'll put it in a new thread. Foiling around -- great sheet!