Bearpits Are Bad Practice

A couple years ago I had someone from my practice come up to me at an event and say that they were having trouble getting into the right head space when it comes to tournaments. I’m sure there’s lots of great answers to how to approach this, but for me the simplest one was, “Spend more time doing tournaments.” The biggest downside to that approach, though , is that it requires you to have more spare time to spend on the road, something very few of us have these days. So instead my response was that at the first practice of every month we were going to spend the second half doing an in-house tournament. The format would change every month because the goal wasn’t to get good at a specific ruleset, it’s to work on how to perform well in tournaments more broadly.

The important thing from the outset was to remember that this wasn’t for the folks who can roll in to a tournament cold and then one-shot ten people in a row right in the face. No, instead it’s there for those folks who have success in drills and pick up fights, but who have trouble going in to high gear on the big day. One answer could have been to bar all the higher end fighters from entering, but that just came with too many downsides. First, it meant that now the higher level people have to give up a good chunk of their practice not just to coach, but to sit on the sidelines bored. Second, it would have denied those folks right on the precipice of greatness from seeing how they stand up. Third, it would have made a bunch of adults feel like they were being relegated to playing T-ball while everyone else got to play the real game.

With that in mind, my aim was to have a tournament each month where the folks still on their way up got to keep fighting, without it feeling like something was just being handed to them. The greatest thing about getting good at fencing is not all of the glory that comes with tournament wins, it’s that they let you keep fighting more than everyone else. If you enter a bracketed tournament and make it to the finals, that means you got the absolute maximum number of fights in that tournament and more swords are always better than less swords. The issue with that, though, is that it means your top end people get more reps in than your up and comers. That’s fine for the big tournament, but just doesn’t align with the principles of a good practice. The answer was that outside of maybe breaking to semifinals at the end, to find formats that let people get in more time doing tournaments even if they didn’t have a great shot at winning that day. So that meant that something like a double elimination bracket was inherently off the table. It’s a solid format and is easy to run, but doesn’t do much to help those who need it the most.

This same idea of, “Hey, what if we gave the new people more reps instead of less?” is why bearpits are a bad way of doing practice. For those unaware of the term a bear pit (aka “king of the hill”) is a set up where one person (the bear) stands in the ring and accepts challengers. The default form is that then whoever wins the round gets to stay in. The upside to this is that it has an incredibly low administrative cost. There’s no figuring out who to work with next, you just get in line and fight whenever it’s your turn. The downside is that it’s a bad default for how to run your local practice.

If your a new person and practice just consists of fighting people better than you, not being given a focus on anything in particular, not getting any direct coaching, and just getting beat up by people more experienced until you hopefully figure it out, you’re just not going to progress all that quickly. Sure, it might be better than just throwing a thousand blows in midair or at a pell without any context, but it also means you’re trying to eat a whole cake at once from the get go as opposed to one slice at a time. Unfortunately, this exact format is the approach of far too many SCA practices.

Guys, my dudes, my brethren in swordplay. New people aren’t going to be inspired to get better by just having the tar beat out of them. There’s a whole paper one of my good friends wrote about this covering why “Whack, don’t die” isn’t how we should be teaching. It’s great that you’re giving people a way to work on whatever they identify as the most important thing as opposed to trying to fit everyone into the same exact mold, but this is not the answer. If you’re having issues thinking of how else you might be able to structure your local practice, please feel free to reach out me and I will be more than happy to offer some suggestions.

There are really only two good use cases I’ve run across for doing a bearpit at practice.

1. You only have three people. This was my practice in college for the first three years. At that point, bearpits are really the only thing you can do if you want to include everybody.

2. As a cool down at the end of practice. We tried doing this as a warmup at the beginning of practice, but the result is that it ended up punishing a lot of the very folks we were looking to help out as it requires you to be able to have your adrenaline spike rapidly and lots of folks need awhile to get fully warmed up. It works as a cool down because by the end of practice folks are tired, so standing in line gives people a chance to breath without just getting stuck sitting on the sidelines looking at their phones. The low admin cost means that no one has to use their brain in order to figure out who they’re fighting next, they just show up and stab whoever they’re told to.

Notice that I didn’t list “reverse bearpits” as a part of this. A reverse bearpit, or “loser stays” bearpit might seem like it solves for everything we’ve talked about. It inherently means that your up and comers get more reps in than your top end folks. The issue is that it can far too often make people feel like now their inadequacies are on display for everyone to see. If you’re tired and frustrated that you haven’t been able to land a touch, getting stabbed in the chest yet again isn’t going to do anything to make you feel better. The trick is to find a way to give the people who need it most more reps without, at the same time, making them feel like failures for it.

What are some other easy practice formats you’ve found work for you local group? I’d love to hear, particularly from folks earlier on in their journeys, what they’ve found works best for them.

I’ll be teaching at three different events this fall. First, I’ll be teaching a class on how to coach, as well as spending a few hours afterwards providing one on one coaching at the Midlands Academy of Defense on September 6th just outside of Urbana, IL. https://placeforstuff.net/events/2025/MAD/

After that I’ll be teaching a brand new class on Bolognese case (two sideswords), an incredibly fun part of the tradition that almost never gets the love it deserves. The class will be at the Pferdesdadt Rapier Classic in Caledonia, OH on September, 13th. https://pferdestadt.midrealm.org/pferdestadt-rapier-classic/

Finally I’ll be leading a panel discussion on how the Italian, German, and Spanish fencing traditions as a whole compare to each other at the Royal University of the Midrealm just outside of Chicago on October 11th.

https://ayreton.midrealm.org/royal-university-of-the-midrealm-fall-2025/

As always, my book “Bolognese Longsword for the Modern Practitioner” is for sale at FoolOfSwords.com.