Do specific weapons nights work?

[jfarmer]

Ok, we've been a recreational club forever (since 1954) with occasional competitive fencers. These days, we're doing more competing and trying to keep both group happy. However, we're in the midst of a prolonged downturn in membership.

One of the things we have run into is the "I wanted to fence sabre, but everyone's fencing epee tonight..." (replace sabre & epee with your favorite variation... With our current rent & membership levels, we can't be open as often as we want, so we thinking of trying specific weapon nights. One night would be sabre, with a scheduled group lessons, followed by open bouting. Another night would be foil & epee, similar program...

Has other clubs had success with such an approach? We want to get our membership numbers up (obviously) but we're also trying to build up all three weapons.

Thanks

[DenverFencing]

with that. We started with a base of epee/saber fencers who fenced on Monday and Wednesday nights. Then I gear the intermediate foil classes on Tuesday/Thursday and turned T/TH into open fencing night for those weapons.

Now, four years later, I open a second location in Golden, CO and I am gearing M/W to foil and T/TH to epee/saber. I am trying to make so a committed person could fence their weapon at both locations. You can check out our class schedule and open fencing times online.

But it can be done. Find out which nights people want to fence and gear the classes that drive to the open fencing on those nights.

Nathan
www.denverfencingcenter.com

[Fencergrl]

One of the clubs I fenced at was primarily epee and foil. A bunch of us girls wanted to do sabre, so we talked some more fencers into trying it. We all wanted to continue to fence our primary weapon, and found switching gear half way through the evening to be a hassle.

As a group we decided which nights we would fence sabre and which nights we would fence our other weapon. This worked really well for us.