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Post by schlager7 on Sept 21, 2003 14:57:59 GMT -6
Received as email
Hey everyone, this is Wes Phillips. The SWIFA schedule has been pretty much ironed out. SWIFA #1 is on October 18th, at Texas State. #2 will be November 22 at Baylor. SWIFA #3 will be either February 21st or 22nd UTSA will host that one and they have requested to have it on Sunday (the council has yet to decide). #4 will be the first weekend of Spring Break and so far we don't have a host for that yet.
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Post by Passing Through on Sept 29, 2003 6:39:16 GMT -6
Anyone actually IN the organization (SWIFA), wanna say something?
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Post by LC Foil on Oct 8, 2003 15:17:30 GMT -6
I know A&M fields a group of fencers to the SWIFA meets. DO any other local colleges/universities send fencers to SWIFA?
Lamar? U of H? Rice?
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Post by Dan Gorman on Oct 9, 2003 12:21:30 GMT -6
UofH has had some success in SWIFA over the years, Rice's involvement has been sporatic of late. St Thomas has expressed an interest. That about sums up the non-Aggie involvement from this division.
Dan
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Post by cowpaste on Oct 9, 2003 13:52:06 GMT -6
UH? Success? What are you talking about? We have no coach, no electric equipment, and no money. All our fencers started fencing in their 20s. We are old and slow.... However, I do believe we will be sending people to SWIFAfy. I wonder if we can pay registration fee with dry foils.
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Post by Dan Gorman on Oct 10, 2003 10:43:55 GMT -6
UofH won the overall title in either 99-00 or 00-01. You have some history there.
Dan
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Post by cowpaste on Oct 10, 2003 21:42:18 GMT -6
That may be true, but back then, we had a bunch of fencers who started way, way before college. They had prior experience and former coaching. Right now, I think we have ONE épéeist who has previous fencing experience. The rest started freshman year in college at the earliest. I'm not saying people who start a bit late can't get good (I myself started February of this year....). It just takes time, dedication, and a strong teacher/coach. We are in college, and therefore school comes first. That means little time for fencing. All I have is the dedication, but what can I do with that when my oponents AND teachers just started last year? Okay, enough complaining for me. What we need is a reel. Yeah. Someone donate a reel please.
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Post by Dan Gorman on Oct 10, 2003 22:10:32 GMT -6
What happened to the stuff you guys had? I know you got at least one working strip off the divisionals UH hosted. Don't tell me it's broken beyond repair -- you're college students, it's a simple machine. You can take it. Really. Be careful though, the springs can explode.
On another note, you guys earned your championship partially on the back of your sabre squad who all started fencing while at UH. As for the rest, I see some of the same problems at A&M, but there has to be sacrifice to be a strong club. Really, there shouldn't be a problem finding good coaching in Houston.
Dan
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Post by cowpaste on Oct 11, 2003 0:54:40 GMT -6
We borrowed all the reels and machines from other clubs to host that tournament we had.
Right now we actually own two reels and one scoring machine. One of the reels is broken. I do not know if it is repairable.
Quality coaching is findable, but he/she would have to work for free. We have pretty much blown our whole budget on equipment (but no reel...!) for this semester. We need to use the remaining money to pay for the entry fees and hotel costs for SWIFA.
Rants removed. They were inappropriate and written when I was really in a bad mood.
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Post by schlager7 on Oct 11, 2003 22:19:51 GMT -6
Actually, haven't I seen you at both Salle Mauro and BCFA. I just KNOW they have coaches.
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Post by cowpaste on Oct 12, 2003 1:41:43 GMT -6
Yes, both SM and BCFA have coaches. The thing is, SM and BCFA are not UH. It is quite a hassle for college students head over to other clubs. I myself have class from 4-7 on Monday and Wednesday. My workload does not allow for much free time anyway. So far, this has been my busiest and hardest semester ever. Actually, the lack of a coach does not bother me too much. My main concern is the fact that we still fence dry. I actually can't think of any other club in Houston that still fences dry. The club really isn't moving in an electric direction anytime soon either.
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Post by schlager7 on Oct 12, 2003 11:24:26 GMT -6
Just out of curiosity, what's wrong with reel? Does it release? Does it retract? Does it allow/fail to allow a current?
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Post by cowpaste on Oct 19, 2003 1:00:05 GMT -6
Well, I just got back from SWIFA 1. It is cool yet not cool. They tried out this new system where each team assigns an arbitrary A B C to each of their fencers. Then in each encounter, the As from each team fence each other, the Bs each other, the Cs each other. No DEs. This was supposed to speed things up a bunch, but it was rather badly done and extremely, extremely slow. We had 11 "rounds" if I recall, and I think we were on the third one at 4:00 pm! That's when UH held a meeting deciding if we wanted to leave or not. We decided to wait till 6:00 pm and see what would happen. Sometime after 6, the organizers gave us four choices: 1. Leave, cancel all results, get a refund. 2. Take the current scores now and determine ranking based on that. 3. Use current scores for seeding in DEs. 4. Let whoever wanted to leave, leave. Finish tournament as originally planned.
At first UH chose option 1. We were tired. The drive was pretty long (3 hours). We just wanted to go home. Then about half the schools left. We changed our decision to 4. With much less schools, everything would be done much faster. We ended up finishining a little later than a normal SWIFA competition finished.
In the end, A&M A team ended up with first. UT A team got second. UH A placed third I believe. Congratulations to the A&M team. I personally only talked to their foil A team, and they were nice and good sports. Those chants were getting a bit loud though....
Anyway, the new format is supposedly famous in the North-East or whatever when tons and tons of schools compete against each other. I do not see the need to do this at less-then-ten-schools tournaments. It was very, very annoying having to wait 1 hour often times in between bouts. Fence, get cold, fence, get cold. In addition to that, I'm sure most people having to get into their fencing "zone." That's really hard to do with so little fencing and huge breaks in between each encounter. I ended up hitting my peek after the 6 pm mark, but I bet it would have been much sooner if we had more bouts.
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Post by Dan Gorman on Oct 19, 2003 20:11:08 GMT -6
I think the reason the tournament was so rocky came down to 3 things:
1. Fencers inexperienced with the format.
2. Referees inexperienced with the format.
3. Organizers inexperienced with the format.
This caused a lot of people to wander around aimlessly when they shouldn't have been, referees running bouts when they shouldn't have been (it sounds weird to say that would slow things down, but it does), and the organizers in giving referees the power to run those bouts. Trust me (speaking as a referee), you don't want the referees to have the ability to run bouts you don't want them to run, because referees seem to think if they can just finish all the bouts on their clipboard, they can go home. Or get fed. Or get fed and then go home. Whatever.
Anyway, I think the SWIFA is on the right track with this system. The delays in the morning were caused by several refs getting ahead of the others and causing confusions as to what round we were in. After a break for lunch, there was one more rocky patch while everyone got caught back up to where they should have been and then things ran fairly smoothly until some teams decided it was late and they wanted to go home. I recall the initial vote being for 3, and then 4, but I could be mistaken. I hadn't thought 1 was even really considered -- it'd just be rude to negate the fencing of those who were willing to stay.
How the teams run through the tournament needs to be tweaked also. The format from club nationals is designed for 6 squad teams (separate men's and women's squads), and had we kept the A and B squads form a school together, we could have done that without losing our integration. It's not like the teammates don't fence each other often enough during the week. Teams with only 1 squad could be doubled up and the day would run through quicker with the load on a strip balancing over the course of the encounter. This keeps one referee from getting ahead of the others and lets the day runs a little more predictably.
As for the slot a fencer was in -- it's not supposed to be arbitrary. The best fencer should be the A fencer, the second best the B, and we now know who the C fencer is.... Of cpourse, you can try to be clever and move that around a little to put a stronger fencer against the other schools weaker fencers, but we're fencers and probably shouldn't be thinking that hard.
Anyway, I thought the tournament was pretty rocky, but a definate move in the right direction. I think if we stay with this format for SWIFA, the tournaments will soon end much quicker than the current behemoths did. I even think it might lead to some schools meeting in duel meets in an effort to get some spectators.
Dan
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Post by cowpaste on Oct 20, 2003 0:17:38 GMT -6
I don't see how you can blame the fencers on this one. Sometimes we had to wait an hour between matches. What did you want us to do? Just sit there in front of the refs waiting for them to call our names? Of course we walked around. We even slept in between matches. The tournament was way too slow. Besides, all the refs had to do was hollah our names and wait oh...1 minute or less for us to run up to fence. Also, don't forget that it was very common to have half the strips or so unused because the organizers wanted to keep the teams together or something like that.
Fencer: "Hey um...Mr. Organizer, do you think we could fence on those usused strips over there." Mr. Organizer: "No, we want to something something something." Fencer: "Okay...." and goes to sleep.
I don't think this system is right on track at all. I also can't believe you want to combine the A and B teams into one squad. So what...since there are about 8 schools or something, I fence 7 people and go home? You want me to drive up 3 hours to fence 7 people to 5 points and go home? Do you seem my problem with this? However, if there were like 30 schools competing in NY, I would have no problem. Sadly, 8 is not 30.
As for the A, B, C thing, it greatly favors schools with two strong fencers and one crappy one. Besides, if we can choose to place our strong fencers in any slot to try and get more wins, it should be expected that the other teams do it too. Effectively, the A strongest C weakest thing is completely pointless.
Anyone who thinks this system is a move in the right direction obviously only cares about getting SWIFA done as soon as possible. Having an early ending tournament can be nice and all, but that should not be the point of the format change. I always thought SWIFA was designed to promote intercollegiate fencing and competition. If we just want to competition to end so we can go home, why come at all? I know there are many fencers who disagree with me, but I like to go to competition to compete, gain experience, and get better. This new system provides almost none of that.
Hopefully the other schools have seen the light and decide to junk this silly system.
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Post by Dan Gorman on Oct 21, 2003 12:44:17 GMT -6
First off, everyone fenced about as many bouts at the last meeting as they would have under the old format -- teams that would have advanced fenced a few less while teams that wouldn't have fenced a couple more. The real difference was everyone fenced every other school (at least until some schools split). Under the old system with a 4 team pool (the largest those pools could be and get us home before midnight), you only fenced 9 bouts. If you didn't advance you're right where you are right now.
Secondly, the SWIFA format favors a school with 3 strong fencers. Always has, always will. To have 2 strong fencers is still better than having 1 though and 1 is better than none. If the one is strong enough, a 45 touch relay format can be overcome, but we tried that and moved away from it a couple seasons ago.
Thirdly, I can include the fencers in those who slowed things down because they often didn't make it to strip in less than a minute and they stopped things to ask questions about the format or what happened next on several occassions. I didn't blame anyone though. I pointed out factors in a new format not running as smoothly as it could have.
As for keeping the teams together, that's a great idea. You should be there to cheer your teammates on. It's fun for you and them and leads to more audience interest which the sport needs in order to grow. Everyone should be trying to cheer louder than the rest at these tournaments.
Lastly, the reason you seed your strongest fencer into the A slot is because the system is designed to seed the top 5 As, 3 Bs, and 1 C into a DE table to determine an overall champion also. If you don't put your fencers where they belong, you can screw them in the DE table. Now that won't be much of a factor until we do that at SWIFA (if we do that at SWIFA), but it's also a matter of pride in the meantime to say, "I'm the top fencer on my squad."
Dan
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Post by cowpaste on Oct 21, 2003 15:02:12 GMT -6
Thanks for the explinations. That cleared things up a bit.
My major concern right now is when the SWIFA results will be posted. My club paid money for entry; the least the organizers could do is tell us how we placed.... The currrent SWIFA page doesn't even have the results of competitions 2 years ago. It's starting to make me wonder if this years results will ever be posted.
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Post by cowpaste on Nov 14, 2003 9:56:20 GMT -6
Does anyone know the results for SWIFA 1? SWIFA 2 is coming up soon and the webpage is still not updated. This is just ridiculous. The schools paid cash to compete in that tournament. Is seeing how well they did too much to ask for? Why doesn't the webmaster give up his position to someone else if he does not have the free time to properly maintain the site?
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Post by FencerNuB on Aug 15, 2004 22:32:33 GMT -6
Iam 15 years old and have been wanting to try fencing for a very long time.I was hoping an experianced fencer would please instant message me and help me answer some of my questions and how i should go about getting started.
thank you, kyle
p.s. my im name is thekymaster
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