| Tips for Summer Nationals
For those of you getting ready to head out to summer nationals, here are some tips. I'll put them into different categories.
Your Equipment
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- Before you leave to go to your tournament, test every weapon, body cord, lame and mask. Make sure to test your weapons for (as applicable), general functionality, weight, and shims/travel. Once you've fixed all problems, make sure you have the grip on tight and everything ready to go. Test your body cords for continuity and make sure they'll handle a tourney load.
Once everything checks out, put it all away and don't touch it until you arrive at your hotel.
- The night before. Check your weapons and body cords again. It's not uncommon for a foil or epee to suddenly not pass weight after being in the baggage compartment on the plane/car ride. Better to stay up an extra 10 minutes fixing it the night before than cutting into your warm up time or getting a yellow card. (Plus, weapon maint. the night before has the nice effect of focusing your mind on fencing.)
Once you get to the venue.
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- Case the joint. Know where the locker rooms (if any) are. Know where the restrooms are. Find your team mates. Set up shop. Go ahead and grab a chair now because you won't find one to use later.
- Equipment check. Take the equipment that they're checking and get into line now. If you're the "junior" person at your club, be ready to carry 4 or 5 masks up to the table. ;-)
- Warm up. You know how you do this best, but remember that your first pool results are vitally important. If you are used to "warming up" during pools and then "turning it on" during the DE portion of your local tournaments, then you are going to want to be good and hot for your first pool bout. Get with some people and do your warm ups and then fence until you feel things clicking, then stop and do whatever stretching, moving works for you to keep warm.
- Focus your mind. Because so much depends on how you start, it's important to not only warm up your body, but your mind also. These are 5 touch bouts, and 1 indicator point can mean 5 places in the DE table. When you're warming up, notice what works well for you today and notice how well you are picking up the actions. Breathe. Visualize making actions that work.
Time for the bouts.
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- Take all your equipment with you. (At least weapons, cords, uniform, tightening tool.)
- Know when you fence. Most ref's get annoyed when fencers don't know they're up. They've got a long day ahead of them with less down time than you'll have.
- Warm up before your bout. It may be 5 jumping jacks, it may be 10 advance-lunges. Anyway, make sure you're ready to go.
- Watch the ref and the fencers. Start to scout them out from the first bout. What is the ref's style. Does the ref see the actions that you like to do? What are the primary actions of the fencers in your pool? What is your initial strategy going to be against them.
- Don't argue with the ref. "But wait, I see the top fencers argue all the time" you say. Well, they've got a purpose for doing it. You don't question the ref unless you are doing it to set up a future touch. If you think it was a bad call, figure out why the ref saw it that way and adjust. If you're in Div3 or Div2, you're more likely to tick the ref off than to win any future touches.
- Fence hard. Have fun!
That's about it. Good luck to everyone.
Even though summer nationals is in my back yard (I'm in Atlanta, GA). I'm not going. Scheduling just didn't work out for sectionals and I haven't had the time to do much fencing. Go over and say "Hi" to Peter and Gilbert at the PBT booth!
Cheers,
Craig
<small>[ 06-23-2002, 09:36 AM: Message edited by: webmaster ]</small> | 
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