How many A rated epee fencers are there?

[SleightOfHand]

Sorry if it has already been discussed, I did a search, but no good results surfaced. Does anybody have any statistics of how many epee As there are? I have seen a breakdown of USFA members by rating, but it was very outdated. Does anybody have this information? Thanks alot for any assistance.

[D+F+P=Hadouken!]

20,851,820...

I got that number from http://www.50states.com/texas.htm, under the texas population.

[OROD]

How many A rated epee fencers are there?

All of them?!?

.

[Chafunkta]

20,851,820...

I got that number from http://www.50states.com/texas.htm, under the texas population.

And I have absolutely no argument against your data.

[mrbiggs]

Here you go:

Ratings news

That's a thread about the 2003 numbers in each weapon. The information you're looking for is in the table in the first post.

In short, the number is almost certainly larger than 116, and probably closer to 140.

[Frank Pratt]

There are roughly 25 "A" epeeists in the Southeat Section alone.

[SleightOfHand]

Wow, thanks alot, that most certainly answers my question!

[peet]

Actually, I suspect there are quite a bit more than that.

While FRED's ratings records are not official, and come with many caveats, There are currently 331 Epee A's in the FRED database. Remove a few who are foreign fencers, a few who are not currently actively competing, a few who may have accidentally (!?) entered bad data, a couple possible duplicate fencer records, and you still would have a lot more than 140.

You'd also have to add a few for fencers that FRED's never heard of.

Again, not official data but....

HTH,
-p

[nyacfencing]

I fenced a few large regional events around the country this year (Remenyik, Duel in the Desert, Phoenix Cup, etc., etc.) and in all of them I noticed an increasing number of A's who were C-level at best. Disturbing...

[keith]

At some stage I am going to have to head down and see what a real, New York, A actually looks like.

[noahz]

At some stage I am going to have to head down and see what a real, New York, A actually looks like.

Well, if you're going to Nationals you could just take a look at Div I Men's Epee top-8, because you'll see a lot of the same people that are in a NYAC or FC Epee open top-8.

[Montoya]

Peet -

How many A-rated women epeeists in your database?

[peet]

Peet -

How many A-rated women epeeists in your database?

67


-p

[oiuyt]

Peet -

How many A-rated women epeeists in your database?

Discarding a few entries (Bigg Bertha, Ivanna Tinkles, Timbuk Tuu, Anne Katherine Donath (should be a foil A, not an epee A), Mike Hawk (I assume he's not a woman)) yields 62. Of those 5 are foreign (including Flessel-Colovic who I assume is not actually a member of the TN division and likely has not entered a USFA event).

Note: I did not attempt to find women that were mis-listed as male.

-B

[Dax]

Well, if you're going to Nationals you could just take a look at Div I Men's Epee top-8, because you'll see a lot of the same people that are in a NYAC or FC Epee open top-8.

I cant wait! Those bouts will be fun to watch indeed!

I fenced a few large regional events around the country this year (Remenyik, Duel in the Desert, Phoenix Cup, etc., etc.) and in all of them I noticed an increasing number of A's who were C-level at best. Disturbing...

You also need to keep in mind that there are differing areas of fencing quality. An A from a midwest section is different from an A in the northeast, who is different from an A in the southeast. The As are usually pretty much proportional to the quality of the fencing in their division or section. And since the Northeast sections are much more developed and have been around much longer, its pretty logical that the As from that area would be much stronger fencers.

Also, the number of fencers in the US has most likely doubled(or close to it) since 2003, so the number of As, Bs, Cs, Ds and Es are and should be around the same proportionally to the numbers in 2003.

[Montoya]

Discarding a few entries (Bigg Bertha, Ivanna Tinkles, Timbuk Tuu, Anne Katherine Donath (should be a foil A, not an epee A), Mike Hawk (I assume he's not a woman)) yields 62. Of those 5 are foreign (including Flessel-Colovic who I assume is not actually a member of the TN division and likely has not entered a USFA event).

Note: I did not attempt to find women that were mis-listed as male.

-B

Sorry to be stupid - but how do you pull this data out of the askfred database?

[oiuyt]

Sorry to be stupid - but how do you pull this data out of the askfred database?

AFAIK it requires being a Bout Committee member of FRED. At least the method I used appears to. With that access I can get a list of every fencer FRED knows about. I can also do searches limiting to people with a highest classification above, below, or exactly at a certain level. I can also export to a .csv file.

I pulled a list of every fencer with at least an "A". I then did the export and opened the saved file in Excel. A quick sort by gender and epee classification gave me a useful list. I then manually scanned the list to look for people that obviously shouldn't be counted.

Obviously limiting the search in the first step wasn't necessary, but I didn't really want the whole list of 16,580 fencers when I knew there were only 520 who had at least one A. FRED also allows for limiting the searches by name, club, division, section, birthyear (before, exactly, after), and gender. I didn't bother limiting to just the 114 female A's, but grabbed all 520 names.

So not a stupid question.

Before anyone asks, FRED has a few triple-A's listed:
Mike Hawk, an Australian fencer born 1859
Ibrahima Ndiaye (information elsewhere on the web indicates an E/D-level fencer from Northeast Pennsylvania)
�‰‰Ô �‰‰Ô, a female Thai fencer born 1894 (yes, that's how the name is displayed)
Ivanna Tinkles
Timbuk Tuu

I leave it as an exercise for the reader how reliable those classifications should be considered.

-B

[Philistine]

One interesting thing anyone can do with askFRED is to find out how many classifications were earned in a given time period. (In the results tab, click on "search results" and then there's a link for "super search" with various permutations to search).

From 1/1/06 to the Present, apparently there have been 63 A's awarded in epee, 22 in Foil and 5 in sabre for tournaments reported on FRED (men and women combined).

Two caveats--these are not necessarily new A's, but also someone updating an older A rating to an A06, and obviously the numbers are only from the subset of those tournaments which are reported on FRED.

--Philistine

[Supermom]

...lots. And lots. Bring 'em on!

[mrbiggs]

While FRED's ratings records are not official, and come with many caveats, There are currently 331 Epee A's in the FRED database.

Wow. That's absurd. Basically, the number of epee As more than doubled in less than 3 years

That's 20 years until every member of the USFA has an epee A.