There are a number of different lenses to view the success and effectiveness of a fencing club, but since the SYC season just wrapped up today with the final bout at the Rain City Super Youth Circuit between Spartak’s Chase Callahan winning 15-5 over Halberstadt Fencers' Club’s Reya Ghayalod in Bellevue, WA we thought we’d review the competition data and see the results!
I’m really excited to report that for the first time in Tim Morehouse Fencing Club history we have won the most amount of SYC Saber medals and most amount of SYC Saber gold medals in the country! Special congratulations as well to Dynamo Fencing Center on finishing 2nd in the count and beating out some of the perennial saber powerhouses.
After opening just three years ago, I couldn’t be more thrilled and grateful for the hard work of our staff, coaches, students and families. We are charting our own path combining the best-practices of modern teaching methodologies, with human centered design of our programs, with data-driven measurement. At the end of the day, the measure of success is always RESULTS.
One of the first goals we set when we opened Tim Morehouse Fencing Club was to become the top Competitive Youth Development club in the country.
At the time, we used the National Club Rankings to measure how we finished. Since the website is no longer being updated, we thought we’d follow along to his methodology of measuring the club through SYC medal finishes.
I’ve included a few different bits of data including the # of entries by clubs, top-8 finishes and gold medal finishes. We also broke down the data by men/women and age-category.
DATA CAVEATS:
Since USA Fencing’s website doesn’t have open API and results are no longer on ASKFRED, this data was entered manually. If you notice any errors, please let us know and we will update them! (If a club name is spelled differently, it will read it as 2 different clubs)
We only counted the first club that a student represents and not the secondary.
We counted the results of the club a student was representing at the time. So, if a student was representing club X in September and Club Y in May then the results in September would count towards Club X.
We combined clubs with affiliate locations into one club. So for example, Sheridan Fencing Academy which has a few different locations is counted as one club.
We only counted Y10, Y12 and Y14. Not Y8 or the Cadets that sometimes occurred at SYCS.
Some Take-Aways From our Subset of Medal Winning Students:
ALL our TMFC Student’s winning medals take a minimum of 2 Private Lessons Per Week (Most Average 2-3). We had zero medal winners taking 1 lesson or less.
ALL the TMFC Student’s who won medals this past season participated in a minimum of two weeks of Summer Training Camps with the average being 3 weeks. By the way, here is a link to our Youth Summer Camps where most of our medalists started! (Youth Competitive Saber Camps Sign Up: https://www.timmorehousefencing.com/summer-camps-1)
The student’s who won medals attended practice on average 3-4 times per week except on weeks with tournaments. NONE of the students who won medals practice over 5x per week or more. (Interesting fact)
Almost all the students who won medals competed in the age-category the year before. 75% + of the medals were from students in their final year of an age-category. (Age does make a big difference!)
MOST GOLD MEDALS AT SYCS - 2018-2019
