Today marks our club having been open for 7 whole years. It has been quite a long time!
This last year has been easier for me than the year before, because I was no longer wrestling with a newborn at home. Nonetheless, wrestling with a toddler is still pretty difficult, and the club has been something happening every week that has kept me sane and active – every time I see my friends here, I perk up and relax a bit.
I have been watching my students become more and more skilful every year. It is truly a joy to see people pull off in sparring the very things we have been working on in our lessons! And more and more often, my students are have sparring success with complicated actions and setups and responses. Since I often find myself without enough energy to participate in the sparring these days, I am usually watching from the side, and I see these cool things happening ever more frequently.
More of our members have joined the instructing team. We finished last year’s coaching course shortly before Christmas, and we are almost finished the next coaching course, with several more people poised to receive acknowledgement as instructors within the club. With the team expanding the way it has, we have managed a number of sessions recently where almost every third person is an instructor!
Back when I started the club, one of my goals was to make myself “redundant but useful”. I wanted to equip the club with a strong core of people who could run sessions and help their peers in my absence, although I wanted to remain useful and at the heart of the club. This approach has served us well over the year with members of the instructing team covering for me a number of times. And I think it’s also beneficial for everyone at the club, to hear and to see the way that different people describe or think about techniques and exercises.
Tomorrow is our July Fechtschule, so we are going to celebrate our anniversary by playing with swords!
