Sabre fencing,

[edew]

[...]Over this past weekend I overheard Yuri Gelman(sp?) giving advice to one of his student "Change if you have to, dont if you dont" Advice I believe in

Did he tell that to Obama?

[edew]

[...]The focus with beginners needs to be on the development of the skills and abilities they will need as they get older, not on developing strategies that the coach thinks may win them touches immediately.[...]

The problem with this ideal is that you might not have people after they get older. Without some immediate benefit, they might not stick around.

I focus on teaching my fencers the game of fencing. That is, the mental aspect of the game-play. "You want to hit the opponent, so if you do this, it will work..." It applies to young, not-yet-physically-developed kids as well as older kids. Understanding the objective of the sport and learning to play in that framework is agnostic to physical development. I tell my beginning fencers that running forward with the blade stuck out is not conducive to winning because the blade can be beaten away easily. "Make your opponent work for his or her touch."

Certainly, what I teach a 8 or 10 year old is not the same thing that I would teach a 12 or 14 year old, regardless of experience. Being bigger allows certain actions to work and other actions to not work. Being smaller likewise allow certain actions to work and others to not work. In some cases, the action that works for a 10 year old will not work for the same kid 4 years later, and vice-versa.

A good example is a head parry followed by a chest cut. For older, faster fencers, this is about as sure a riposte as any. For a 10-year old or younger, the time it takes for the riposte to arrive is longer than the lock-out time caused by the continuing remise cut of the original head-cut by the opponent. As nice of an action as it may be, it won't score. So why would I teach it to kids, just to say, "well, 4 years from now, you'll thank me." I'll be lucky if the kid will stay 4 months. Instead, I teach a workable riposte from a head-cut, and 3 years 6 months later, I'll introduce the chest riposte from the head parry. I mean, really, how long does it take to master a very primal, simple, basic head-parry chest cut action?

I teach all fencers to look for the simplest way to score against the opponent. Find a solution, but make sure that the solution is simple. If it involves a counter-parry counter-riposte, forget it. (That's not to say that I don't teach and train fencers to make such actions. I just tell them to not look for that as an initial solution to the problem of hitting the opponent.)

To extrapolate this scenario. Suppose the problem is the inability to score because the opponent makes great parries. The initial solution is to counter-parry and riposte. A simpler solution is feint-disengage. For young kids, they just can't muster the strength to make the feint look believable, but whatever. How about an even simpler solution? Maybe not attack and get your opponent to attack instead. Then you parry him and riposte to hit. Yet an even more simple solution is to attack in such a way that your opponent doesn't want to parry. In foil, I just love to get two lights on and the referee saying, "Attack by EDEW, counter-attack by Joe." (And then Joe arguing, "But he wasn't attacking!") While explaining each possible solution, I do also throw in the caveats: stop-hits against feints, attacks could arrive before the parry, referees could mistaken the action as your opponent's attack and your counter-attack, etc.

As a coach, I think it's better to teach what works for the moment. Then teach them new things when it applies. Indeed, I think there are some aspects of fencing that requires teaching and learning something to a great level of familiarity only to discard it as one moves to the next level. And it's not possible to get to the next level without having gone through that first level. The book, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, is a good analogy to this idea: one must learn some aspect of fencing to a deep level of understanding. Then, and only then, can one create and develop a tactic that will completely eschew that aspect.

[Jason]

Eric,
You're talking about about several different things, so I'll try to address each separately.

1. Student retention. I know a lot of clubs have trouble with student retention, but I don't think that this has anything to do with whether or not the coach is training the student to perceive what's happening in the bout, nor do I think it has to do with whether or not the coach is teaching the fencer with his future prospects in mind. The majority of the time, student retention has to do with whether or not the child is having fun. It's extremely important that, while the coach is focused on his student's long term prospects, he makes the training fun. If it's not fun, it doesn't matter what the coach is teaching because he'll have no one to teach it to.

2. Developmental limits. Developmentally, some kids won't yet be physically (or mentally, or emotionally, or whatever) capable of doing certain things properly. The solution is to focus on what they are capable of doing while helping them develop the ability to do the things they can't. However, this does not mean teaching things that will become irrelevant later. You can still teach things that will continue to be useful when the child is older. The majority of the movements used by top competitors are simple and can be executed, to some degree, even by children--this is especially true in sabre.

3. Teaching for the moment. Teaching should always start simple and then get more complex. So, in this respect, "adding more on later" is the right approach. The problem comes when the place you're starting from does not lead to the complexities you want to end with. Let's take notalent's example. If the coach is teaching the fencer to make actions without watching his opponent, it's going to be extremely hard several years later to suddenly be able to fence with any adaptability. The student will need to completely change the way he is thinking, moving... really, he'll have to change everything about his approach to fencing. Even for a very talented fencer, this will take years. If, however, the coach has always trained the child to understand what's happening in front of him, there is no complete change, but rather the continued development of what he's already learning--which, in the case of understanding what's happening, is a basic element of fencing. It's important to keep things simple for beginners, but they should be taught things that lead them to the place they will need to be in order to be successful fencers.

[Allen Evans]

When a student first comes to fencing there is a very narrow window of time in which the student is capable of soaking up a lot of information. The coach's job is to make sure that the actions a student learns in that first year or two (which seems to be the time frame in which new students have their fundementals set) do not restrict their later growth.

These restrictions usually seem to occur because the coach teaches fencing "tricks" rather than fecning concepts. For example, I have a lot of fencers who come to me from coaches that have never discussed the use of distance in a tactical way. It takes these new fencers a long time to refocus on the distance relationship between them selves and their opponents, rather than blade work, if, in fact, they ever do. For some of them, it's too late: their coach taught them a few things that "get touches" but the better fencers eventually apply real fencing concepts to the problem and defeat them, and move on.

The coach can also help their student in understanding that winning bouts takes time, and the coach can build a culture that supports understanding fencing rather than simply winning bouts. This can be as easy as asking the fencer pointed questions about competition: "Which distances did you score at?" "Did you use (this concept) or (that concept) when you fenced? Did someone use it on you?" Showing excitement in these discussions can help show the student that the process of fencing is what is important, not just winning bouts. If the student is engaged iin the fencing process, they'll be likely to stay, even if they aren't always winning bouts at first.

[Inquartata]

Have I stumbled into the "Coach's Corner" by mistake? I thought this was a thread on sabre fencing...

Briefly I pause to check the title...

[emagdnim]

generally I just watch my opponent, try to see whats going on in their head.