The following is Part 3 of a directors guide written by Frank Zamary for the Royal Arts Fencing Academy HEMA tournaments. He has generously agreed to share with the wider community, along with a few tweaks to make it read a little bit better for a wider audience.
- Part 1 – What Are We Doing?
- Part 2 – How Are We To Do It?
- Part 3 – Practical Tips
- Part 4 – How Do We Learn?
Before the round begins, you may wish to go over the rules briefly with your judges, especially if there is anything that is odd about the ruleset or about how you would like the ring to be run. Communication is the first key to smoothly running a ring.
As the director, you should think about where you are placing your judges. Specifically, you want to make sure that your best judges are located across from you. This way, your best judges will be able to cover the angles that you are not able to see. If you have a good director who can see the same thing as you, it can be nice to have that confirmation that you both saw the same thing, but you should already trust your best judges to see the same thing as you from the same angle. What you need is the best set of eyes to see the things that you are unable to see.
As a director, your main concern needs to be the safety of everyone involved. In the event that something looks unsafe, call a safety halt; calling halt multiple times in quick succession or calling “Safety” are good ways to differentiate the safety halt from a normal halt. In most cases, just explain that because of the safety halt, the exchange will just be thrown out. Judges should also be cognizant of the possibility of needing to call a safety halt. Common safety halts arise from things like equipment failures or something being in the ring that should not be there, such as a piece of fallen paper or, as once happened to me, a child who ran into the ring.
Below are the things that each party should be focusing on in order of their importance.
Director
- safety
- control line judges
- Ring control: (position in the ring, cardable actions)
- tempo
- targeting
- quality
- control
Line Judges
- safety
- targeting
- quality
- armband control. Prep your side. Keep audience away from strip
- control
- communicate if they saw something worthy of a card or possible strike out of ring etc
- give opinion on tempo if asked
CRITS and Tempo
CRITS is intended to be a quick and easy way for judges and directors to keep quality in mind when judging a fight: CRITS is an acronym and it stands for: Contact, Rotation, Intent, Target, Structure.
Contact: Did the weapon make sufficient contact. That is to say, was it more than incidental and not just the tip? For a Cut to have valid contact, look for about an inch or two of actual edge contact. For a thrust to have valid contact, did it have forward motion against the target?
Rotation: Did the sword rotate approximately 45 degrees? Sure, less movement can produce a good cut, but it is almost impossible for judges to distinguish a good cut with minimal rotation from a light tap. This doesn’t, however, apply to thrusts.
Intent: Was the attacker moving their weapon in a way that is indicative of a purposeful attack? It doesn’t matter if the attacker meant to hit the head but hit the hand instead, as long as they intended to make an attack. What we don’t want is flailing movements or incidental contact to be scored.
Target: Did the attacker strike a valid scoring part of the opponent. Normally, the only off target areas are the back of the head, the spine, and the groin.
Structure: Did the attacker make the attack with good structure such that the attack is valid. Things to look for at this level are edge alignment and body structure indicating proper form and ability to transfer force.
What is tempo? Simply put, tempo is the length of time it takes to complete an action. It is not an absolute measurement of a unit of time, but is instead a measure of movement. In Aristotelian Physics, Tempo measures the movement between two points of rest. In fencing terms, this can be thought of as starting in a guard (rest), making a cut (motion), and ending in a new guard/position (rest). Now, a cut from Tag to Langort will necessarily have to travel a shorter distance than a cut from Tag to Weschel. While they would take different absolute units of time (fractions of seconds), they are both a single tempo.
Different events and rulesets will use different measures to determine whether a hit was in or out of tempo, i.e. whether a blow is a double, an afterblow, or out of tempo and therefore invalid.
For ORVL [Ohio River Valley League] events, the basic test for whether an afterblow was in or out of tempo is this: Did the attack have forward movement towards its target at the time that the first blow was landed? That means that if a Zwerchhau is coming behind a fencer’s head as they get hit, while the attack was already begun, it would be out of tempo. Tempo will always be a difficult call to make and for that reason, the ultimate call on tempo should be left to the director, but judges should not call hits they believed to be out of tempo and may need to conference with the director on those calls.
Make sure that you have a strong grasp of the rules surrounding tempo before you go to an event. It may also be wise to talk to your fellow judges and directors and especially to the event organizer to make sure that there will be consistency between directors. Whatever the rules say, make sure that you do your best to apply the rules of the event evenly.