Hi!
The weekend 9-10 September the Swedish clubs were called to the yearly club conference, and yours truly was there as club representative. The whole thing was held on a huge ferry leaving from Stockholm to international waters, which makes it cheaper - the ferry company can have reasonably low prices for conference groups since they recoup on the taxfree shop.
This is election year (coming up this weekend) and the politicians have found using the catchphrase "we support sport" to be a winner. Therefore, incumbents and opposition have gotten themselves into a promise-war over who can give more money to the Swedish sports federation, which suits us just fine. A big topic was that all clubs should see to it that all their activities would be documented and tailored so that they would be eligible for support according to a big program, and that it would be a real shame if fencing would not get all the money out to clubs - money which then would go back to state coffers - just because we donīt get our act together.
The 2nd big topic was youth fencing, and how we should keep up the retention rate. It was widely agreed that losing juniors is a big problem, and among the solutions floated were more competitions for them, a points system for them, etc.
topic 3: what to do if we were to get a significant monetary windfall? Many people present thought that all or a significant portion of that should go right into the federation coffers, since we were quite significantly in the read last fiscal year. However, the chairman specifically forbade that as a suggestion for now, since such an answer would not be so useful as policy guidance in the general case. Several people forwarded the idea that a large proportion of the money should go to maintaining a larger team base, not only the top 3-4 but the top 5-8. This would provide the future national Sr team members with more and better local competition, and reduce the vulnerability to team member losses due to burnout, childbirth, injury, etc. Several other ideas were also floated. A leading foil club representative floated the idea that sweden should explicitly stop supporting foil (except for national and local competitions) since that was what was being done, albeit not statedly so.
The saturday ended with a dinner. At my table, a club trainer in a small boondocks town was present. He comes from Belarus, and had ended up there since his wife had been taken over by the local gymnastics club as a trainer. He has been on the same team as Romankov in Soviet-wide competitions, so he had a lot to say.
After that, some of us wandered round the boat a bit before we went to bed. A gang of gals celebrating a 30ieth birthday stopped me, and had my picture taken beside the birthday girl, ostensibly because of my snazzy military-issue glasses, or so they said.Standard "fencing??? gee whiz, that seems cool" discussion ensued. I, Romankovīs old teammate, and one of his senior students left the happy gals and we found the dance floor in the stern of the boat. The band playing there was called "Spotlightz", a name which tells every Swede exactly which kind of music they play. Much to my dismay, ZZ was not there as a representative of her club. Otherwise, I would have asked her for a dance, just for the heck of it. Instead, a bunch of ladies asked me to dance. Since I have gotten "no" far too often as an answer when I have asked for dances, and known what a sink that is to my self-esteem, I said yes to them all. The last one looked like Janet Reno, only add 25 years and 50 pounds, which put my principles somewhat to the test.
Sunday started with through discussion about all the "windfall money" opinions produced by the groups which has discussed that topic the day before. I think we have some sort of rough consensus, and since almost all clubs were there, there should not be any nasty surprises.
Then followed reports from the referee committee, the task force for updating the competition rules, information from/about fencing in places where fencing is extra scarce, how to avail oneself of the money that the state has set aside for study purposes, and finally info from the equal opportunity (gender-wise) group.
The ref committee has put together a database where every reffing activity is to be reported (compliance seems to be quite high) which puts together a reffing activity number for each ref and weapon, based on the type of competition and the level reffed. This promises to be a quite valuable tool for several purposes. The task force had put together a document similar to the one posted by oiuyt here some months ago, it will now be discussed in the clubs. The study money issue took a long time, but since it reflects on specifically Swedish laws, I will not bother going into it here. The equal-opportunity group mentioned that there are laws which state that if a sport does not fulfill some specific numerical criteria, its funding from state and local coffers will be seriously curtailed. Among those criteria is that a club must have at least 40% of its leadership from each gender, and that the election committee of a sports federation must have exactly 50% each, except the chairman/chairwoman. Several clubs reported problems with getting their female members to take up offers when they were invited to run for office. How do you solve that problem in your club?
Finally, the federation chairman fielded questions handed in previously. Among them was a question of whether SvFF was asking the Swedish olympic committee to work within the IOC to increase fencing from 10 to 12 weapons. He told us that yes, the SvFF had been doing so, along with every single other fencing federation which had leaned on their national OC. However, the issue was closed, done deal, finished, etc. - there will not be any 12 medal sets, not now and that is how it will be forever. Quit kicking the dead horse.
Have a nice time!
Peter Gustafsson
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Originally Posted by KD5MDK 
