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fencing 101  {RESOURCES} help me get started

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BEGINNERS GUIDE TO TOURNAMENTS


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FENCING BASICS - TAUGHT BY OLYMPIANS, RACE IMBODEN AND MILES CHAMLEY WATSON

FENCING BASICS - THE WEAPONS TAUGHT BY OLYMPIC COACH MIKE PEDERSON
 I WANT TO TRY FENCING BUT HAVE LOTS OF QUESTIONS  
{THE WMC GUIDE TO FENCING 101}
Foil Lame
Sabre Lame

Many of you are new to fencing.  There is a lot to learn, and we all need to start somewhere. We hope the following gives you an idea of what the sport involves at the high school level.  We’re assuming you know absolutely nothing at all. Most of us didn’t either.  No question is silly. If you have a question, please ask one of us.  Knowing more about what is going on makes watching fencing a lot more fun.

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WMC has a team for the boys and a team for the girls. Each team has its own coach. Within a team, you are either a varsity fencer or a junior varsity fencer. There are no freshmen teams. Everyone on the team goes to every meet. The boys and girls travel to away events on separate buses.

 

WMC will have 16 dual meets this year. There are also tournaments, but you don’t need to worry about them quite yet. A dual meet is where your team fences against another high school’s team. Our varsity fences their varsity and our junior varsity fences their junior varsity. 8 meets are away. 8 are home. All our home meets will be in the old gym.

 

Three different weapons are used in fencing, the sabre, the epee and the foil. So every high school team therefore has three weapons squads.  Each squad at the varsity level has 4-5 members.  The best three are “starters” and the others are subs, like in other team sports.

 

A varsity dual meet consists of 27 individual bouts, and usually takes about 2 hours to complete. Each weapons “squad” fences 9 bouts.  9 x 3 is 27.  There are rules about who fences who and in what order they fence within each weapon group, but they are not something you need to understand yet. The basic rule is no fencer can fence more than three bouts.

 

Dual meets are scored on a cumulative basis, not on a weapon by weapon basis. Because 27 is an odd number, it takes 14 victories in the individual bouts to “win” a dual meet. So if our sabre squad had 2 victories and 7 defeats in their 9 bouts, the epees went 7 and 2 in theirs and the foils went 5 and 4, WMC wins.  2 + 7 + 5 is 14. It’s pretty easy to keep track of which team is ahead at any point in time once you understand how the scoring works.

 

So exactly what is a bout?  It’s one of us fencing one of them on a “strip” about the size of a bowling alley. Strips are laid out on the floor with conductive fabric strips or marked out with blue tape.  Not surprisingly, you have to fence within the strip or you get penalized. There is lots of running back and forth going on. Bouts in high school are a maximum of 3 minutes long.  The three minutes is actual fencing time, not running time. Somebody with a stopwatch keeps the running time. The object of a bout is within that 3 minutes to “touch” your opponent in the right spot 5 times before he or she touches you in the right spot 5 times.  If you do, you win.  Just a warning. There are some strange rules you eventually will need to learn about ties and overtimes.  Let’s not confuse you with them right now, OK.

 

Up to this point you should be able to follow along without pictures. From here on in pictures really help. We've included them in this article to help you along.  Consult them as needed as you read through the rest of our beginner’s guide to fencing.

 

Why do fencers pretty much all look alike?  Well, they do and they don’t.  They don’t if you know what you are looking at. First, a fencer is someone who wears so much protective gear, most of it white, that parents sometimes cannot identify their son or daughter across a crowded gym. Like penguins, it also is not easy to be sure who is a boy and who is a girl.  But the gear is there to protect them from getting hurt. Safety is always rule one in fencing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Here is why they don’t look alike. Epee fencers always are dressed entirely in white.  Foil fencers wear an armless grey vest (called a lame, pronounced lam-ay) over their whites. Sabres wear a grey jacket, (also called a Lame) complete with full sleeves. Only their lower half is white. So you really can easily tell by looking who fences what weapon. Look at the pictures of the three different fencers. The so-called “target” areas for each weapon are shaded in red. Also, please look also at the details of the handles of the three weapons that are pictured. They are not at all alike. So now that you know who looks like what and what their weapons look like, lets move on to how fencing gets scored and what really happens out there on a strip during a bout.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Electric Fencing 101.  Fencing is scored electronically. Touches to the “right” spot on your opponent’s body happen so quickly even the referee can’t always be sure what happened. This is why computerized scoring machines are used.  Please see the picture of a scoring box below.  You are going to see this little guy over and over again if you come and watch the kids fence. The black boxes sit in the middle of the strip, usually on a table. During the bout they wink, blink, turn red, green, yellow and white, and buzz and beep a whole lot. The black box is your best friend during a meet, because it tells you everything you need to know about what is happening. It helps if you understand a little bit about how it works.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The black box is like a light bulb. It does not light up until someone flips a switch to  complete a circuit.  A black box also needs a complete circuit, because inside it are some very smart little electrons waiting patiently to go light up one of several colored lights.  One fencer is the red light and the other is the green light. If your color light on the black box comes on, it means you scored a touch first and completed the circuit of the electrons rooting for you to win. It’s almost that simple.

 

Wiring 101: What you really need to understand is on the last picture. The black box is the brain. Floor cords run from the brain to the reels. The reel wires hook up to your fencer.  How, you ask.  Well, inside all the white stuff fencers wear is a 10 foot long wire, called a body cord. The plug at one end exits at butt level in the back gets and hooks up to a reel wire. The other end comes out by the hand you fence with, and plugs into your weapon.

 

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The weapons are wired too, only with tiny, thin wires you can’t see. When your fencer hits an opponent in the right spot, the weapon yells ‘ON”. This makes the black box happy, because there now is a completed circuit for electrons to race through to light up a red or a green light.  The box does not care who scores the touch, but in the best of all worlds it is a WMC fencer. So let the games begin and watch carefully for things you have learned here.

 

See you on the strip! Go WMC!!

 

Examples of body cords
Target Areas By Weapon
Foil
 
 
Epee
 
 
 
Sabre
 
 
Epee Lame
epee lame.png
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