What Does Your Practice Optimize For?

I’ve spent the last year traveling a fair bit and getting the opportunity to fence with all sorts of folks across the world. Something that’s been percolating around my brain as a result is asking, what does your local practice optimize for?

Every practice (or club) has a set of goals, whether they are explicitly stated or not. Some places focus their energy on the academic side of things, urging their fighters to be able to recite the books chapter and verse. Other clubs serve primarily as a fun form of fitness and a nice place to hang out. Still others exist as a place for the instructor to feel good about themselves by always holding back something from their students.

One particular dynamic that’s really stood out to me is the focus on recruitment vs prowess. Now yes, you need some amount of recruitment to have any practice whatsoever. Without people, there’s no way to get prowess. Think of these two not as a binary, but as a spectrum, with some places focusing more on one and others focusing more on the other.

To illustrate my point I’m going to use a couple SCA practices, but the same ideas still apply to HEMA, judo, wing chun, etc. Also to note, I am not trying to say that either of these practices is doing things wrong, just that they are clear examples of optimizing for different things.

Exhibit A: Gwyntarian fencing practice, barony of Brendoken (Akron, OH)

As far as fencing practices in the Midrealm go, this is by and far one of the largest. There is often 25+ fencers in attendance. This despite Akron having less than 200,000 residents, a city, but a small one at that. It’s also one of the youngest practices in the kingdom. The constant complaint in the SCA is, “Where are all the young people these days?”. Gwyntarian’s answer is, “They’re right here”. While there are still fencers of all different ages in attendance, your typical participant is in their early to mid twenties. I don’t know the particulars of their recruitment strategy, but whatever it is it seems to be working.

The other side of the coin is that Gwyntarian (and Brendoken more broadly) doesn’t have any masters of defense (MoD’s), the highest award for fencing in the SCA. If you had just taken the 30+ MoDs made in the Midrealm and sprinkled them across the kingdom, the chances of the largest practice not getting a single one would be inconceivable. That’s just not how prowess works, though.

Exhibit B: Ayreton fencing practice (Chicago, IL)

Despite being right next to the third largest population center in the country, the Ayreton practice tends to attract about a dozen and a half fencers on a typical week. It’s also pretty old on average. Lately there’s been a few college students attending. Before that, though, the youngest attendees were in their late twenties with the oldest being in their mid seventies.

The two things the Ayreton practice optimizes for are:

A) Books

B) MoDs

Until getting a recent transplant from another kingdom, every single person at the practice is doing their best to follow a specific historical fencing treatise. A lot of practices both in HEMA and the SCA end up producing a mash of styles or fencing without any particular fidelity to the period texts. That’s not the case here, though. The default is by and far Italian rapier with a pretty even split between Giganti and Fabris. On top of that, the practice also has perhaps the highest concentration of diestros/diestras (Spanish rapier fencers) in the Midwest. There’s also a pretty heavy concentration on Bolognese fencing both sidesword and, increasingly, longsword. Even the folks who aren’t interested in what everyone else is smoking are still doing Meyer or I.33.

The other piece the Ayreton practice is known for is for being a straight up MoD factory. Out of the 42 MoDs made in the Midrealm, 11 of them all came from this one singular practice. Another one came from the smaller, secondary practice run by the same barony. On top of awards, members of the practice regularly take home well over a dozen first place tournament victories year after year.

While it’s a great fit for those folks who want to go straight to the top, the upside down pyramid nature of the practice can often feel discouraging for those folks trying to work their way up. It can be hard to track your progress when there’s this enormous chasm between you and the person ahead of you.

So What’s The Big Picture Here?

Whether you acknowledge it or not, there is something your practice is optimizing for. In their seminal 1971 essay, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” the scholar Jo Freeman points out that there is always some sort of power structure in place. Even if your group does away with titles and awards entirely, that doesn’t mean everyone are now full comrades with no differences in power between them. Instead, now you just have a system with no one discussing what it’s optimizing for.

The same goes for your local fencing practice. Every practice has something it’s aiming towards, whether that’s said out loud or not. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an either or between recruitment and prowess, but that doesn’t mean everything is fully neutral with no implicit goals. Sometimes the answer is that it’s a fitness club with the occasional focus on martial effectiveness. Other times it could be that it’s a group for intense scholarship with no one going home and doing pushups afterwards. Maybe the overarching goal is to provide people a refuge where they can feel safe away from everything going on in the world.

Take some time and think about what it is your practice optimizes for. Maybe even discuss it with a few of your fellow attendees. Once you’ve done that, now comes the big question.

“What do we want this practice to do?”

If you discover that what you have is a social club and what you want is to create tournament winners, there’s going to be some pretty big underlying tensions. If your stated goal is diversity, but everyone there has an identical color palette, then that means you’ve just been miming a bunch of empty rhetoric. If your stance is that whatever system your teaching works across the board, but all of your top performers have the same silhouette as the head instructor, now you know that there’s limits to how things are being taught.

Sit on it for awhile. Then, once you’ve had some time to think, feel free to reach out with what your practice is maximizing for today and what you want your practice to maximize for tomorrow. I’m always happy to talk.

I will be giving a talk this Saturday at the Royal University of the Midrealm (RUM) comparing Italian, Spanish, and German fencing traditions. It’s going to be a great time and I’m incredibly excited just to get to talk shop for a couple of hours. https://ayreton.midrealm.org/royal-university-of-the-midrealm-fall-2025/

If you haven’t picked up a copy already, my book “Bolognese Longsword: For The Modern Practitioner” is available in both Europe and North America at FoolOfSwords.com