| Member
Join Date: Oct 2000 Location: Wichita, KS
Posts: 66
| Hi, you've got some good questions, and they're the sort of thing that most fencing clubs have been pondering for a considerable amount of time. They are not easily addressed however. There are many reasons why we don't have more fencers than we do, although the sport is growing.
One of the reasons is that a lot of fencing clubs are operating near the capacity they can handle, for the instructors that they have. Here in Wichita, we have one moniteur who runs beginner foil classes, three (including myself) who are doing some specialized individual lessons, and Maitre Hootman, who does individual lessons with any of the intermediate/advanced students who want to work. Currently we're on a three day a week schedule, because thats all the time the coaching staff has, and because we sublet space to a wu-shu school and a kenjutsu school to pay the bills. Other clubs have a similar situation in a nondedicated facility.
As far as advertising goes, it's just not a budgetable item for many clubs, nor could we handle the influx of people we'd get through any sort of mass marketing, with the exception of the occasional newspaper ads. In the past we've run ads for several days, usually a 2in x 3in ad, for about 200/300$.. which will get about 20 responses, of which we'll see about 10 to 12 people, and perhaps 4 or 5 will continue past the beginners class. We've run similar 6 week classes for the past year or so, by word of mouth and our phone book ad, and had about the same amount of success.
As far as getting teens involved,we have a large number, but fencing has to compete with , and usually loses to, all the winter HS sports. When it comes to getting children involved, fencing is a very different sport than the 'ball' sports. Look at the leagues for soccer, football, etc.. Pop Warner, Little League, Biddy Basketball, AYSO.. What do they have in common (for the most part)? They are parent run, parent coached activities. In the ball sports, you've typically got a parent who may or may not have experience in the sport, coaching the team. In the beginning there are practices for x amount of time, then games start. A league of perhaps a dozen or more teams exists to play against, right there in the same city, or at the same sports complex. With fencing, not many parents will necessarily have the required skill to coach sucessful, let alone safe, fencers. If I want to fence anyone but my teammates, I have to make at least a 2 to 3 hour drive. The infrastructure does not exist in many places to run a league. for example, say WFA, Kanza, and ISA decided to form a beginners league with the idea of taking people brand new to fencing, teaching them to fence and getting a league like AYSO going. We would work out a season, schedule, and probably a lot of legal/insurance/corporate stuff I'm not aware of, especially if we wanted it to operate independently of our club. Or, if the division were in the shape to do it, a divisional league, supported by the various clubs, would be good, if the clubs were interested. we would also have to figure out how to equip all the fencers. Then we have to decide if it runs concurrent with, or opposite of the normal USFA tournament season. Quick and dirty calculations using the cheapest stuff Blade sells, indicate that to equip a child for league play, in equipment that is legal, would be about 345$ per child, including mask, lame,2 body cords, a jacket, plastron, knickers, a glove and 2 cheap electric french foils. That doesn't include league participation fees, or club membership fees, or USFA membership. The local AYSO fees are something like 30$/season, and the local Little League (high caliber competitive group) fees are $50/season. Clearly the clubs can't pay for this out of their own budge, and would have to pass the cost on. It would seem that a fund raiser of some sort would be necessary in order to pay for the equipment, or the parents can pay it out of pocket. Once that is done, you still have to deal with the fact that to fence competently and safely, it takes more than the couple of weeks of practice that you usually have in childrens league sports before you start playing. One way to combat this would be to run a beginners class as a pre-req to the leauge. Say we do this, and we set Saturdays as our competition days, and decide to do a three way meet each week.. We've then got about 3 hours of driving each way, each saturday, plus probably 6 hours of fencing, even if we do only team events... This probably wouldn't work out real well for us, but it would be potentially do able, if enough people really wanted to make it work. also, these saturdays would completely hose the normal fencing practice for the clubs, at least until the league people had developed some competent directors in their own group, as well as people who could run, score, and set up a tournament. Something like a league setup would be good, necessary in KS, as we have a non existant divisional schedule, although it would have to be planned around national and sectional size tournaments. I think the truth of it is that it would be much harder to get something like this started from square one than any of us have wanted to tackle in the past. In KC, if more of the clubs had the same interests, it would be much more feasible, and certainly is something for the KC fencing community should be thinking about for a feeder to its own nationally competitive programs. IT is something that needs to be done, and I think there may be some league stuff going in some of the reallllly big divisions, but we need it here.
Again, as far as purchasing equipment goes, the simple fact is that we're more deprived here in Kansas, than say New York City, or California.. American Fencers Supply has a shop in San Fran, on Folsom St, and Allstar has a shop at one of the clubs in NYC, Santelli's store happens to have a club there, in NJ.. Triplette is the same way in NC. In relation to not finding fencing stuff in the mall stores, we just don't have enough people to create a demand and fencing isn't really an activity that you can do without decent coaching. People who aren't in a club, whether SF/CF/HF/SCA or what, really don't NEED fencing gear. When I was in elementary thru high school, baseball, basketball and so on were part of the curriculum, and it's not unreasonable that I might buy a basketball or tennis racket, and play, having learned at least the basics in a sport that doesn't pose the risk for a serious/lethal injury due to breaking equipment. There are a couple of schools in the wichita area that include fencing in their PE curriculum, and we have done demos for them, and anyone interested is able to join our classes. We've gotten perhaps 1 or 2 people that way in 10 years. However, these kids, and their PE teachers have no idea how to maintain the eqipment, even to the point of keeping blades rust free, and pommels tightened, let alone having a mask punch.
Many times, one of the clubs in an area will be a reseller of equipment, but you'd have to stock one or more of most items, in most of the common sizes, or you're just playing mailorder middleman. The clubs in KS aren't, for the most part, big enough to support this yet. One problem has been the reliance of clubs on supplying the use of club equipment to beginners. Its worth what it costs you. If you have no investment in equipment, you may not have much pushing you to continue when the going gets a bit rough. The Fencing Institute of Texas is a bit bigger than WFA or ISA, and has a larger competitive team. They stock a considerable amount of stuff from BG, and I think part of their fee for an som of their intro classes includes cost of a dry starter set. All this said, I'm not sure a real need exists for keeping in-stock equipment, except for points parts, wires, and blades.. Our fencing club has several companies catalogs, including Santelli, Triplette, BG and PBT, easily available, and ordering forms , phone numbers, web urls, etc are there. One of the moniteurs does a once a month order from BG if anyone needs anything. I've ordered online from PBT and The Fencing Post repeatedly, without ever having any problems.
It's not that coaches don't want to have lots of fencers, its often that they don't know what they need to do to get fencers, can't meet the logistics requirements for making a concerted effort to get new fencers, on top of what their responsibilities are now. Ask Mark Wickersham what sort of headaches he had, and how much of a mess it was getting things figured out and un-mucked up when he took over ISA originally. That may give you some idea of the mess involved in getting more services, more classes, more league play started. This division basically sucks. We have no schedule, even without making a big push for a beginners/childrens league. We barely have qualifiers, we have next to no rated directors, and little communication between the clubs. it IS getting better, but it's taking a bloody long time. At least we're not spending the entirety of the divisions money on sending two people to South Africa for the World Championships like we did in the late 90's. That was a REAL debacle. You're right in what we need, to do to grow fencing, but we've got to get our crap together locally, and get what we've got running smoothly, before we can take on more responsibilities. I'd love to see it happen, but even more, I'd like to see each divisional club even hold 2 three weapon tournaments, with mixed open, and mixed D and Under, each season. If we could do that, we could have potentially 10 tournaments each year within the division, not counting qualifiers, sectionals, NAC's..etc. That would be a MAJOR step for our division.
Perhaps if we had that, we might see a bit more involvement in general.
Oh, By the way, can you hit Mark up about finding out who all might be interested in mongolian BBQ either Sat or Sunday night at the NAC? I'd love to have a BIG party to descend on the place..
best wishes, and keep pondering the questions above, hopefully if enough people think about it, eventually we can get something figured out.
chris
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Chris Holzman
Moniteur D' Escrime |
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