Parents Guide : Competition Season

Every competition season brings the same mix of excitement and nerves — for the fencers, and for the parents too. Watching your child train for months and then wait to hear if they’ve made a squad is hard. We understand that completely.

We also see the same thing happen every season on the sidelines. The WhatsApp groups light up. Comparisons start. Stories about "how selection really works" travel faster than any official announcement. We’d like to talk about that honestly.

Believing in your child isn’t the problem

If you didn’t believe your child was talented and hardworking, you wouldn’t be spending the money and the weekends. That belief is a good thing and we’re glad you have it.

The problem starts when belief hardens into certainty that any other outcome must be unfair. Certainty needs someone to blame.

How selections usually work

Selection is rarely a club matter. Most of the time a fencer is being picked to represent something wider — a state, a national squad, a development group, or an event with a limited quota — and the decision sits with whoever is doing the selecting.

Every selecting body has its own criteria, and they differ. Some lean on ranking points or results from designated competitions. Some hold trials. Some use a panel of selectors weighing a season as a whole. It’s always worth knowing which applies before drawing conclusions, and the criteria are usually available if you ask for them.

Where criteria leave room for judgement — and most do — selectors weigh things differently. Consistency across a season against one strong weekend. A head-to-head result. How a team fits together rather than four individuals. An injury, an off day, or how much room a young fencer still has to grow.

Put the same two fencers in front of two experienced selectors and you can get two different answers, both perfectly reasonable. That’s the nature of a judgement call. It’s also worth remembering when a decision goes the other way: more often than not, it means a close call went against your child, not that something improper happened.

How a small comment turns into something bigger

Almost nobody sets out to start a rumour. It usually begins as one frustrated sentence to another parent.

But a story gets messier every time it’s repeated. The first version has I think and maybe in it. A few tellings later those are gone, and details have appeared that were never there. Then it stops being about a decision and starts being about a person — a coach’s ability, a selector’s honesty, another family’s motives, sometimes a child who has done nothing except train hard and get picked.

And none of it reaches the people who could actually answer it. Nobody can respond to a question that was never put to them. So it keeps running, unchallenged, when ten minutes with a coach or an email to the organisers would have settled it.

Our fencers notice more than we think

Children pick up the tone in the car on the way home. They notice a parent going quiet around another family. Nobody has to say anything out loud.

Friendships built over years of training side by side start to cool over something the kids never asked to be part of. That is much harder to repair than a missed selection.

What actually helps

Keep the roles separate. Comment on effort and attitude at home. Leave the technical and tactical feedback to the coach.

Don’t over-read one result. How a fencer performs at 12 tells you very little about where they’ll be at 18.

Let your child set the pace. Enthusiasm pushed from outside fades faster than enthusiasm that’s genuinely theirs.

Keep your disappointment separate from theirs. A calm "let’s see what we can work on for next time" does more for a child than any conversation about why someone else got in.

Ask the right people. Coach for coaching, organisers for selection. A direct question gets a faster and more accurate answer than any group chat.

When something doesn’t sit right

Start with a conversation. Come and talk to us, and if the decision was made elsewhere we’ll help you work out who to ask. Almost everything that grows into something larger could have been settled by one conversation at the right moment.

When you do come to us, you’ll get a straight answer. We try always to tell the truth, even when it isn’t the answer you were hoping for, and to be as direct as we can about how something was decided and why. We would rather be honest with you than comfortable.

We also know that no club suits every family. Sometimes people decide to train elsewhere, and that’s understandable — it happens in every sport and we don’t hold it against anyone.

What we would ask is this: don’t take it to the other parents first. Spreading a rumour, or getting other families to take sides against a member, a coach or the club, won’t get you an answer. It only spreads. And the people it reaches in the end are usually the children. A young fencer loses a training partner because two adults stopped speaking. Another walks in believing his coach is against him, and stops taking the risks in training that actually make him better.

It isn’t something we’re willing to let run. Where it starts to affect our fencers or our coaches, we’ll raise it quietly and directly with the family concerned, and we’d expect that to be the end of it.

Fencing is individual on the strip. Off it, it’s a community. Let’s keep it one everyone is proud to belong to, long after this season’s team list is forgotten.