Tournament 2018 Thoughts

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My Club has just completed their 2018 open tournament. This post is a summary of my thoughts on this experience and follows from this and this posts from previous years.

As an overview, the tournament is now pretty convincingly the largest in New Zealand. A number of competitors this year called it the "national" HEMA tournament. It's not a target we aimed at but it's understandable why people think this. This year we had about 50 competitors from 6 different Clubs (not including mine) from throughout the whole Country.

I wasn't organising this year though, as Club President, I did take on my share of tasks and general cat herding to keep things moving.

This year we pretty much repeated the format of previous years so it was over two days with the Saturday full of serious competitions and the Sunday with informal fun activities. On Saturday we had:
  • Synthetic Sidesword
  • Steel Single Sword
  • Tournament Beginners Competition 
  • Longsword
  • Spear
  • Mixed Weapon
The ruleset is that the first person in an exchange that gets to two points wins, with extremities being counted as 1 point and deep targets as 3 points. The overall winner of the tournament is the person who wins the most sections. 

Participation thoughts

 I participated in three sections (the limit, introduced this year) and didn't do particularly well. I think I place in the top third in each section but didn't get into the top three. I put this largely down to the fact that I wasn't, unlike last year, particularly focused on preparation this year and pretty much went in without a plan. I guess I just wasn't motivated to win particularly this year, I was pretty non-plussed by the whole competition side of things. On the flip side, I really enjoyed the tournament overall as an experience. So, I count that as a win.

I was Marshall for one section and line judge in two others. As President, I did the introductory "speech" at the beginning and I think I did a good job setting the bar very low in terms of expectation for judging. As a result, I don't think we had much in the way of grumbles or complaints about line judging. From my experience in the sections, it was pretty good compared to previous years but still the usual mixed bag of missed blows and random calls.

Thoughts on the other participants

We had a number of HEMA clubs join this tournament for the first time and this year there was a notable increase in both the quality of the protective equipment and the number of suitable steel weapons. For the first time I think about two thirds of participants had made-for-purpose HEMA protective equipment and steel weapons with proper flex and weight. This is excellent and we're discussing whether this means in future we can start to limit the use of synthetic weapons in the tournament.

Tournament winner

The overall winner was the person who won the most sections. Simple right? However in the past, we did not limit the number of sections you could enter but some people who were suckered into Marshalling/Judging and would therefore by default be handicapped. This year, because of a large number of participants, we imposed a limit of entry into three sections with everyone in our Club who wasn't in a section then automatically assigned to Marshalling/Line Judging duties. This worked well and made the competition for overall tournament winner fairer.

Mixed Weapons section

We dropped the rapier section and introduced a "mixed" weapons section. This was basically for people to take a pair of weapons chosing between sword & buckler, sword & dagger, sword & cape etc. The idea is that you could come up against an opponent with unmatched weapons. I think this section worked well and people definitely enjoyed it. I missed the rapier section though.

Overall

 I think the event has hit it's stride, we didn't change up much this time and it seems to be growing bigger and bigger. Definitely, with people getting used to the format, there were less grumbles and more good humour. Looking forward to the next years one already. Looking forward to some other Clubs doing their own competitions and inviting us...





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