Jan. 29, 2009

Being involved in nationally competitive fencing for almost 10 years, I have seen a great number of very poorly run competitions.

Set ups and tear downs that contained more arguing than constructing, and tournament days themselves being overrun with complaints and delays. Sometimes, a delay of 2 or 3 hours after the scheduled start time is possible. As a captain of our fencing team, I was very pleased and impressed with the way we handled our first hosted competition under our new head coach.

Set up was conducted on Saturday. I was very pleasantly suprised to see nearly all of our competitive team voluntarily come in to help. Even though a number of our team are new to the sport and have never set up for a fencing meet before, everyone was very efficient and cooperated well. The actual tournament ran very smoothly, and actually finished early than planned. All the new fencers handled the pressure extremely well, and did a good job representing CSU.

Tear down after the meet went even more smoothly than set up. Even though we had all been in the gym from 8:00 AM to 5:30, nobody complained about staying for another couple hours to clean up.

Even though we threw a lot of new variables into the mix this season, our home meet is the first public example of how well we are meshing together. I was very pleased to be a part of our team.