Children's training equipment

[GrimRiposter]

Greetings everyone.

In the last two years or so, our club has seen a great increase in the number of youth we're getting. For our September youth class, 23 new youth registered. This was on top of the 15-20 we already had. The ages were from 7 to 14.

We're pretty comfortable with the 11-14 age ranges. They can handle our "normal" material pretty easily. It's the 7-10 range that's tricky. Some things work, some don't. We're getting more and more youth from this age range and are re-evaluating how we train them.

One of my advanced students who has been helping me with this class sent me a link to the Leon Paul site with their "Mini-Fence" system for ages 6-10. It looks interesting and might fit our situation nicely, but I would like to hear from some coaches who have used it, good or bad. It would be an investment for our club and I want to get all the information that I can on it.

As I said, right now I'm exploring the options and trying to gather more information.

Thanks in advance,

The Grim Riposter

[Tiwaz]

We sometimes use foam sabres for kid in one of my clubs and they seem to work quite well but both my coaching mentor and myself prefer to allow everyone to use normal kit and set up loads of training games for the kids in controlled conditions that allows them to fence whilst stil remaining safe.

[GrimRiposter]

Yes, for our "continuing" group, they use regular equipment. We were looking more for the Beginning Fencing course for our 7-10 ages. It's a 4-month class intended for kids with no experience at all. The goal of the class is to teach the very basics in a fun way and to encourage them to continue on to the next class.