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Welcome to the New Season, Members!
The signs of September are all around us: Regional tournaments are underway, we're nearing the first registration deadlines for NACs and we've seen college teams assembling across the nation. The anticipation and excitement are palpable.
It's been a rather active offseason for USA Fencing as an organization. I want to first thank so many of you for renewing your membership with USA Fencing. To date, our membership number is 4,000 higher than this same time last season. Thank you for being a part of this sport, and good luck in the season ahead.
To briefly look back at last season, we just named our Clubs of Excellence for 2022-23, including Kaizen Academy, which won an award for the third time, and the Academy of Fencing Masters, which has won a stunning four times. This year we acted on a member's suggestion to add a Veteran Club of Excellence, and the first of these was won by Manhattan Fencing Center. A huge congratulations to luminary clubs such as Alliance Fencing Academy, Dunwoody Fencing Club, and Northwest Fencing Center as well. As we seek to repeat our Club Best Practices Conference early next year, I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about the great habits of these and other clubs who are, as our banner says, "the heartbeat of American Fencing" — our grassroots clubs where every fencing journey begins.
Fencing journeys like the one enjoyed by Shelby Jensen PLY, who competed over the weekend in Busan, Korea, in back-to-back parafencing tournaments: the Under-23 Worlds (earning a bronze!) and the World Cup. Best of luck to our parafencers as our Paralympic qualification series really takes shape. By the way, we’re just about a year away from those Paralympic Games in Paris.
Meanwhile, international competition at the FIE World Cup and Grand Prix level is still to come, but satellite competitions are already underway, with Maia Weintraub (Princeton University/Fencing Academy of Philadelphia) taking home gold at the satellite tournament in Brazil.
Once again this season, we’ll be welcoming the very best in the world to our shores on three occasions.
- In October, we welcome the world to Daytona Beach for the FIE Veterans World Championships, where our amazing Veteran national team will be defending their Championship as a nation. (It's worth noting that we top the medal tables at the Cadet, Junior and Veteran levels!)
- In January, we've been awarded a Junior Men's Saber World Cup and are seeking to partner with a club, university or tournament organizer to host it. (Interested? Submit a bid by Sept. 15!)
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In March, we’re lucky enough to host the FIE Foil Grand Prix, which will accompany the second SJCC of the season. Our host will be a major East Coast city to be announced very soon.
As for domestic tournaments, next month we launch right back into national competition with the October NAC in Orlando. And what about the 2024-25 season? We are close to securing our NAC sites already in the hopes of giving you, our members, even more notice of the schedule than we achieved for 2023-24.
In other promising news, we’ve been joined by a number of new sponsors recently, including CollegeVine and our major sponsor at Avenues Online. Speaking of Avenues, the outstanding Magda Skarbonkiewicz just announced she's attending Avenues for her senior year.
These sponsors join Naked Wines in our major sponsor group. We'll shortly announce a law firm partnership as well, and it's worth noting that many of these have come from the connections in the community. Thank you to those members who have opened these opportunities for the sport.
We’ll see the launch of the speaker series this month, with USA Fencing Hall of Famer Dr. Justin Tausig one of our first speakers. Later sessions include world-renowned sleep science experts, collegiate experts, and more. Meanwhile, Aleksandra Shelton OLY and Jen Oldham are currently in Colorado Springs finishing the USOPC and University of Delaware’s ICECP education program alongside coaches from around the world.
This month, we’ve launched an eight-part email Welcome Series to send to new fencing parents. It's a set of emails covering different areas of fencing, such as event structures, the points system, how to navigate USA Fencing and of course information on safety and SafeSport. This is an effort to educate parents, and we intend to expand it to new Veterans and other constituents joining USA Fencing for the first time.
Another service-focused improvement is implementing our Zendesk customer service tracking system across our operations to ensure you get timely answers to your questions. While members can still email information@usafencing.org with their questions, the magic happens behind the scenes as we're able to respond to those questions more quickly and effectively. Pleasingly, we are over 94% satisfaction already — a reminder that our Events and Membership teams are specifically measured on the service they deliver to you, the member.
That said, this month we had two major issues that caused unwelcome division in our community. We are, after all, one USA Fencing.
The first, where we already noted a Nostra Culpa on our communication, was around Coaching Education. We made a change, with the help and support of a few leading coaches, to implement a test option to prove a basis of understanding of fencing safety and culture in the club. This was a difficult episode to work through for our community and caused undue stress to our coaches, but I really want to make one thing clear: We are here to work with you, not against you. We are here to have reasonable conversations about how we move forward to make this sport the best it can be.
The second was surrounding rule t.109, the "strip coaching" rule, which will be discussed by our Board of Directors this weekend with a way forward identified. (The rule has been suspended for now.) The underlying issues are what we must all pay attention to: a respectful relationship between referees, parents and coaches. We encourage those who have experienced significant issues with an individual to file a report to USA Fencing so we can deal with those individuals in an appropriate way.
I also want to take a moment to recognize our clubs, as we close in on 600 clubs. It has been a difficult time for some clubs, given the changes to our club membership structure. The grand majority of clubs have actually paid less this year than they did last year for their club membership with USA Fencing, and more than 90% of clubs that applied for discounted club membership fees have been granted that discount. Still, we recognize there are clubs who don’t fit with the system we designed. We appreciate our clubs, and that’s why as we look ahead to this year we have significant plans to expand our services to these clubs, highlighted by our working on a service app to help clubs reduce their operating cost. We also intend to make the experience between club and national membership more seamless for athletes and athlete families — a huge thank you to Olympia Fencing for the inspiration on this project.
Our Board convenes this weekend for a strategic planning session. As you may know, one of the major roles of the board is to set the 30,000-foot vision for the organization, as in where we are going. It's our job as an operational staff to make those visions a reality.
For the first time, we sought membership submissions for this plan, and we appreciate the several hundred of you who contributed. This critical meeting will see the involvement of key committee chairs, as well as our U.S. Fencing Foundation Trustees. We won’t have a finished document by the end of the weekend, but we’ll be well on the way, and of course we'll publish that document as soon as it is completed and approved by the Board. We’ll also be evaluating appointments of new Foundation Trustees and Special Board Directors, electing a Chair, and tackling other important subjects.
Speaking of impactful changes, I recently listened to the Congressional Commission on the Olympic & Paralympic Movement. The Commission was created and funded by Congress to evaluate potential changes to the Olympic & Paralympic movement and could fundamentally change not just Olympic & Paralympic sport but all sport in this country.
A big focus of the hearing was the state of the U.S. Center for SafeSport. First, let me be absolutely clear: Please report abuse to Fence Safe, to the U.S. Center for SafeSport and to local law enforcement. These processes are important, and we must continue to go forward with addressing abuse in sport.
However, we also must voice the issues that we see with processes that do not allow the National Governing Body to take meaningful action that, with due process, is deemed important for our community. We must advocate as a community that Congress fix and improve the major issues with the system that is set up to adjudicate issues and protect our athletes. It’s not working, and that’s not good enough. We care deeply at USA Fencing about protecting our members and our athletes, and we need partners in that endeavor that want the same.
That's a lot to cover in one month, but we've been quite busy here at USA Fencing — all in an effort to get the 2023-24 season off to a strong start. With that in mind, I look forward to seeing you out on the strip very soon.
As always, we welcome your feedback, and your interaction, so hit reply!
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