Clare L. Deming

This tournament was held on March 10, so I’m a bit behind on writing a summary of the event, but I still wanted to get to it. This is another one of the tournaments in the Tri-State Veteran’s Cup. You can find my thoughts on some of this year’s events here and here.

Travel to the Event

This tournament was held at Sheridan Fencing Club in Manhattan. I was able to take the train into NYC and then grabbed a taxi for a quick trip across town.

The Venue

This was my first trip to Sheridan Fencing Club and I had a little trouble finding it. Due to the train schedule, I arrived earlier than I really needed to, and the club wasn’t open yet.

I didn’t see any signage to indicate the club’s location, even though I appeared to be in the right general area. It turns out that the entire front of the club is a large glass window. After hours, a metal door rolls down to cover the glass.

After only a few minutes, someone arrived to open the door and I found myself in a chilly but compact space. The heat kicked on and I tried to move around to warm myself up, but my hands and feet were cold for longer than I would have liked.

The fencing space only has six strips, but for the purposes of this event, that was adequate. One perk that I did not expect was that they were able to run instant replay for all of the direct elimination (DE) bouts.

While I was warming up, coffee and bagels arrived. I definitely needed that coffee and soon felt more prepared for fencing.

Tournament Format

This tournament was conducted in a standard format, with a round-robin style pool followed by 100% promotion into a DE tableau. The women’s event had 8 competitors and there were 25 in the men’s event.

The women fenced one large pool of 8, followed by a quick DE round. The men were divided into 4 pools (7, 6, 6, 6) and then DE’s.

Full results from the day can be found here.

One of my favorite aspects of this tournament was the prizes! The winners went home with a set of Japanese swords and a stand. It’s nice to have awards other than the standard fencing medals.

My Fencing

I had an uneven day in the tournament, going 5-2 in my pool. That made me seeded #2 for the DE tableau. Through my DE bouts I never really hit my normal stride and I struggled to do what I wanted to do. In the end, I finished in 2nd place, so it wasn’t really a bad day. I just felt like I didn’t fence terribly well.

See more of my tournament reports here.