Eligibility of Graduate Students

[KShan5[PrFC]]

No, I haven't. I mostly snubbed the CMU club when I got there, but I've since begun to appreciate it. To my knowledge it doesn't compete as a club against other schools, though; its members just practice some, and then go to USFA tournaments.

So I'm completely an outsider looking in, and my two reactions are a) some mystification about why NCAA is such a big deal, and then b) some interest in why the team aspect works so well in NCAA but not as well in the USFA, and a comparison to other successful team programs internationally.

For what it's worth, I also think NCAA football is dumb.

It just seems like you don't understand/appreciate/what-have-you the enjoyment that comes from team sports. Did you play football, or basketball, or like....any team sport before? It just seems shocking to me that you cannot comprehend why people would enjoy fencing for their school as a team.

[MyrddinsPrecint]

It just seems like you don't understand/appreciate/what-have-you the enjoyment that comes from team sports. Did you play football, or basketball, or like....any team sport before?

Or watched any of The Mighty Ducks movies?

[misha]

FIE relay format is more competitive and more energizing than separate bouts format.

Too bad USFA have not had any meaningful team competitions for a long time.
Although the powers know it and at least trying to change something this year.


In separate bouts format (3 person team) you can have:
- really-really bad fencer who drops all his/her bouts 5-0 and still win
- or a couple of moderate fencers who can barely win one bout out of 3
and one good one who wins all of his/hers bouts and still win.


In a relay format it is less likely and the format makes each touch,
let alone bout extremely important.


.

[eac]

I'm not fundamentally extremely team-oriented, but I'm also not completely team-tone-deaf. For instance, I like to watch pro football, and I think if I were talented in that area and I wasn't worried about my body and brain being totally destroyed, I would really enjoy playing for e.g. the Patriots.

I did play baseball when I was small, and I enjoyed it reasonably. I still enjoy watching major league baseball, despite being aware of how completely braindead it is.

I just find universities to be really arbitrary units for which to root. I don't feel any special connection with people in my university; we happen to be members of the same educational institution, and that's it. People who get excited about NCAA sports seem to feel like they're part of something really special just because they all went to X educational institution.

The thing about the Patriots, or any pro sports organization, or even many USFA fencing club teams, is that that group is together for a reason; the organization brought those people together that season because they were all interested in and committed to winning, and they see that commitment in each other and therefore can commit to each other. They weren't just swept up randomly by an admissions department.

And, also, the other thing about it is that the goal is always the highest level of competition in the sport (the Superbowl for football, Worlds for fencing) and every competition (regular season games->playoffs for football; local competitions->NACs->world cups for fencing) leads up to that goal. It's interesting to watch that, and it's even interesting to watch the lower-level of that (e.g. the Lions), but it's really *not* that interesting to watch other random leagues that aren't linked in any way (e.g. AFL, CFL, what have you). I view (again, as an outsider, who has not witnessed the magic) the NCAA as basically the AFL/CFL/whatever, but bizarrely, people go and fence in it when they could be paying more attention to USFA/FIE (NFL) things.

[epeemike81]

I'm not fundamentally extremely team-oriented, but I'm also not completely team-tone-deaf. For instance, I like to watch pro football, and I think if I were talented in that area and I wasn't worried about my body and brain being totally destroyed, I would really enjoy playing for e.g. the Patriots.

I did play baseball when I was small, and I enjoyed it reasonably. I still enjoy watching major league baseball, despite being aware of how completely braindead it is.

I just find universities to be really arbitrary units for which to root. I don't feel any special connection with people in my university; we happen to be members of the same educational institution, and that's it. People who get excited about NCAA sports seem to feel like they're part of something really special just because they all went to X educational institution.

The thing about the Patriots, or any pro sports organization, or even many USFA fencing club teams, is that that group is together for a reason; the organization brought those people together that season because they were all interested in and committed to winning, and they see that commitment in each other and therefore can commit to each other. They weren't just swept up randomly by an admissions department.

And, also, the other thing about it is that the goal is always the highest level of competition in the sport (the Superbowl for football, Worlds for fencing) and every competition (regular season games->playoffs for football; local competitions->NACs->world cups for fencing) leads up to that goal. It's interesting to watch that, and it's even interesting to watch the lower-level of that (e.g. the Lions), but it's really *not* that interesting to watch other random leagues that aren't linked in any way (e.g. AFL, CFL, what have you). I view (again, as an outsider, who has not witnessed the magic) the NCAA as basically the AFL/CFL/whatever, but bizarrely, people go and fence in it when they could be paying more attention to USFA/FIE (NFL) things.

Reading this, I'd say you are, actually, pretty team-tone-deaf. "Like[ing] to watch" a team sport is pretty unrelated to understanding the satisfaction of what it means to be on a team. It means winning together. Losing together. Celebrating and mourning together. Defeats are softened and victories sweetened because they're done together. It's a great feeling that everybody should get to experience in their lifetime.*

As for thinking Universities are arbitrary units for which to root, I just flat disagree. At least in my experience, a University is more than just a educational institution. It's a community. If you didn't feel that about your school, then I truly feel that you've missed out on a fundamental experience of being an undergrad.

-m

*Much of this paragraph shamelessly stolen from Aaron Sorkin

[DrWhiteTX]

It also depends on the school and conference. IVY's do not allow graduate students on teams even if you eligibility left.

[Superscribe]

They weren't just swept up randomly by an admissions department.

What is this i don't even.

The question raised was whether or not you had ever been on a team before. You didn't answer. I'm inclined to say you haven't. I'm also inclined to say you've never really had a group of friends you were close with before either, but I get ahead of myself. Don't you have a project team or lab that is tired of getting spanked by Stanford robotics all the time?

It's kind of like that.

[eac]

As for thinking Universities are arbitrary units for which to root, I just flat disagree. At least in my experience, a University is more than just a educational institution. It's a community. If you didn't feel that about your school, then I truly feel that you've missed out on a fundamental experience of being an undergrad.

-m

Yeah, but fundamentally it's an arbitrarily formed community. The people in it don't have anything particularly in common other than accidents of admissions and underinformed choices they made in high school. This is undoubtedly more of a thing for me than it is for anyone else, but I can't get excited about being in a group that's arbitrarily formed like that. I can get excited about being in a group where all the people are there for some common reason.
I suppose it can happen that there starts out being some common reason, and it gets boosted by going through the same stuff as anyone else, and then the common reason starts to be the shared history, but I've never had shared history with anyone either, in almost any context.

What is this i don't even.

The question raised was whether or not you had ever been on a team before. You didn't answer. I'm inclined to say you haven't. I'm also inclined to say you've never really had a group of friends you were close with before either, but I get ahead of myself. Don't you have a project team or lab that is tired of getting spanked by Stanford robotics all the time?

It's kind of like that.

I have been on teams, and I was very briefly on the team that proceeded to revenge-spank Stanford robotics in the follow-up round, but dropped it like a hot potato because it would have consumed my life and meant I would have had to stop fencing for however many years it took them to get to the Moon. (They're doing the Lunar X prize now that they finished with the DARPA challenge stuff.) It didn't help that I'm a software person, and the Moon wasn't as much of a software challenge as it was a mechanical engineering challenge, and the software involved was basically of the form, "It's not that complicated, but if it has any bugs whatsoever, all 40-50 of us lose $200 million and any chance at glory."

In the very brief time I was on that team, I did very much feel that pull of the team and failing or succeeding together and all that, which is why I think I'm not completely tone-deaf. That's how I knew it would consume my life; the pull of the team was such that you know that everybody else is working around the clock to make the collective effort work, and you feel like a turd if you don't put in the same effort.
It helped that the leader is Red Whittaker, who is a cross between Chuck Norris, Dumbledore, and Steve Jobs. But also, and more importantly, every person there was a) an enormous bada$s at whatever they do, b) there because they independently had chosen to join the team sending the robot to the Moon.

Edit: You know, I think another reason the current team events suck is that you never actually do have a big crowd of teammates that you know cheering you on in team bouts. You have the few people who happened to be there that day fixing their stuff, but it's never a big crowd of people all in the same jackets. It would be cool if there were that crowd, and I guess if you have that in NCAA but not in USFA that could be something. I'd still have trouble, though, because everything I knew about fencing would still be coming from somewhere that wasn't the college coach/club/team.

[KShan5[PrFC]]

eac....this may seem kind of dickish, but it's an honest question. Where you home schooled?

[epeemike81]

In the very brief time I was on that team, I did very much feel that pull of the team and failing or succeeding together and all that, which is why I think I'm not completely tone-deaf. That's how I knew it would consume my life; the pull of the team was such that you know that everybody else is working around the clock to make the collective effort work, and you feel like a turd if you don't put in the same effort.

Then how don't you understand the appeal of being on a team?

That's the experience on a good NCAA (or club) fencing team! Note, by good I'm talking about the team atmosphere, not necessarily the quality of the fencing.

-m

[eac]

Heh. No, I wasn't homeschooled, but I've always been fairly introverted, and was never particularly socially adept. I once took an online autism test and scored high, and various more empathetic, communitarian people I know scored very low. However, I've never been diagnosed in multiple encounters with the psychiatric profession, and in general it's not something people guess about me when they meet me. I think it's more of a continuum thing, and I'm more in that direction than average, but not nearly enough to be officially over the threshold.

As a possibly amusing example in the same autistic vein, I don't understand choosing which pro team to root for based on geography. I grew up in California and now am in Pittsburgh, but I have no interest in the Giants, A's, 49ers, Raiders, Steelers, or Pirates. I root for the Patriots and Yankees instead, because I like it best when excessively talented teams dominate in opponent-soul-crushing ways, and then proceed to only slightly break their emotional flatline expressions when they win. (The Steelers are an excellent team, but they're vastly too friendly to be opponent-soul-crushing. Hines Ward smiles all the time. Blech.)

As for the robot team being the same atmosphere as NCAA teams, yeah, the effects were the same, which shows that I'm not 100% team-tone-deaf, but the causes weren't the same.
The causes were a) that I thought everyone on the team and especially Red, who was effectively the coach, was just fantastically good, and b) that everyone was there for a common reason that they had chosen.

So, if I'm on an NCAA team, but I really owe everything that I do right on the strip to some club coach unaffiliated with the college team, that's going to kind of kill it for me. If it weren't so much the case that college teams are who they recruit, and instead got a lot of their value out of actually making their kids better, that would help. I think there's a lot of money left on the table in that department. In most other sports, and indeed for European fencers, 18-22 is supposed to be an age of steep improvement. As it is, people usually plateau, because the coach doesn't usually get big billing for being able to cause huge year-over-year improvement in their fencers, only for extracting maximum short-term performance from the products they get from their suppliers.

[MyrddinsPrecint]

So, if I'm on an NCAA team, but I really owe everything that I do right on the strip to some club coach unaffiliated with the college team, that's going to kind of kill it for me. If it weren't so much the case that college teams are who they recruit, and instead got a lot of their value out of actually making their kids better, that would help.

I went to a very self-selecting school, and everyone who was on the fencing team chose to be there, and only a couple of us at any given time had had any previous fencing experience.

While mid-level private schools may have a pretty random student body.... state schools often have a very large in state population, which affects shared experience-- I saw The Departed opening weekend in the movie theatre closest to UMass Amherst-- you could feel the shared experience in the air. And the better the school is, the better the student had to do to get into their number-one-omg-wanna-go-there-school, or had a few options and was able to pick the best fit.

Many schools do have further shared experiences. Some schools have a unique dorm system, or mandatory classes for freshman, or an interesting location (especially if its the middle of a major city or the middle of nowhere).

But, look, you learned how to code before you got to the Moon project, right? Just because your "coach" didn't teach you every single thing you knew that had to do with the project at hand didn't mean you couldn't learn from your peers and "coach", and because you knew things others didn't, that meant you could actually contribute MORE, right???

People choose to be on a college team even more than they choose a college.... If you made a mistake, and a college isn't a particularly good match, it takes a while to fix that one. If you aren't getting much from a college team, you walk out and don't come back. You make that choice before every single practice.

[TrainingDummy]

You're not going to have the time necessary to commit to an NCAA team while you're in graduate school, sorry. It just won't happen.

[JTX]

I root for the Patriots and Yankees instead, because I like it best when excessively talented teams dominate in opponent-soul-crushing ways, and then proceed to only slightly break their emotional flatline expressions when they win.

I neither agree nor disagree with this, but I find it amusing--probably because I grew up in New England, loving the Pats, hating the Yankees.

[eac]

It's true that I knew how to code before I got to the Moon project, but Whittaker would have added enormous value on top of that, as you say. My contention is that on average for top fencers, college coaches theoretically *could* but currently *don't* add that value, because nobody has come along and combined good recruiting with added value and blown everyone else up, and shown that that helps.

And it may even be that the returns from doing that are not that great, since you only see really different results by junior or senior year, and it'd be better to invest the same mental energy into recruiting. Or, if you know how to fence one way and the kid coming in comes from a completely different system, you may have difficulty immediately adding value, especially if you don't want to sacrifice short-term success by rebuilding. And, if the kid coming in is better than the best person you've ever coached, or if the kid's previous coach is better than you, rebuilding is probably going to make things worse anyway.

This line of thinking is one thing that makes me very dubious about the NCAA.

edit: JTX, unless you're not very old, I imagine the Pats didn't have that quality when you were growing up, did they?

[JTX]

JTX, unless you're not very old, I imagine the Pats didn't have that quality when you were growing up, did they?

That's true. They were more the scrappy underdogs with occasional good finishes. These recent years have seemed a bit surreal.

[prototoast]

You're not going to have the time necessary to commit to an NCAA team while you're in graduate school, sorry. It just won't happen.

That's not necessarily true, especially at big sports schools that have masters programs that cater to student athletes with remaining eligibility.

[dcrocket]

I can get excited about being in a group where all the people are there for some common reason.

If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon. — Bokonon

[Cookeit]

Having fenced for a large high school team in the past, and now the president of a very established, strong college club team, I really enjoy fencing in a team environment.
I remember at USACFC's last year, I really enjoyed having 30 people cheering for me as I fenced in the individuals.

However, I do believe that the FIE team format is more fun than separate bouts. This may or may not necessarily work for club teams because more often than not the team is comprised of; one super good person, a mediocre guy, and some newby or second year fencer. This means it would mainly be a team match between the captains of each team. Luckily everyone in my squad is more or less equally skilled.

Also, I believe the OP's question has basically been answered.
But,
If you are considering fencing for another club team in graduate school, I believe you will be eligible. At least in the Midwest Conference, I'm pretty sure there is not set amount of years you can compete. This may vary from conference to conference.

[whtouche]

If a college/university/whatever, as a community, is "arbitrarily formed" then what do you consider more, for lack of a better word, legitimate?
You mention "accidents of admissions" but pretty much everyone at any given college/university is there because they chose to be there. For whatever reasons, similar or dissimilar to their peers, they all opted in, and that's just the beginning. As a result of this Choice they all made, they then go on to have hundreds and thousands of shared experiences with people in this same community, some of which go a long way towards shaping what kind of people they will become for the rest of their lives.

I'm not sure what you consider a legitimate community, but I think the above is a pretty good description.