The line we never drew: strip coaching, t.109, and what “good” should look like
Walk down the aisle of a NAC and you can hear the whole spectrum in about forty feet. One coach says “distance” once and goes quiet. The next one is dictating every action like a play-by-play announcer on amphetamines. A third is on his feet screaming at his fourteen-year-old between every light, loud enough that the fencer two strips over flinches.
All three of those coaches are, technically, doing the same legal thing.
That’s the problem. Not strip coaching. The absence of any shared understanding of where it stops.
What the rule actually says
FIE rule t.109 governs order and discipline around the field of play. Internationally, the practical effect is that you do not coach your fencer during active fencing. Brief advice between touches gets tolerated to varying degrees depending on the referee; a sustained monologue does not.
USA Fencing carries an American exception. The domestic language permits coaches and spectators to give advice to fencers, with the qualifier that in all situations they must not disturb the order of the bout.
Read that sentence again, because the whole argument lives in the second half. The exception was never a license. It was a permission with a condition attached. We have spent years enforcing the permission and almost never enforcing the condition.
The 2023 whiplash, and my part in it
The short version of a messy year:
- March 2023 A motion to strike the American exception and conform to the FIE rule reached the previous Board. It was referred out to the Referees’ Commission, Tournament Committee, and National Coaches for review.
- April 2023 The previous Board adopted it. Effective date: August 1.
- August 2023 The Referees’ Commission published enforcement guidance that pretty much aligned to literal enforcement.
- September 2023 The Board suspended the change by emergency action after significant community backlash.
- December 2023 I put a motion on the agenda to reaffirm the American exception. It passed. That’s where the rule stands today.
I want to be fair to the proponents, because the intent was sound. The stated rationale included better preparing our fencers for international conditions and curbing abusive behavior toward referees and officials. Both are real problems. Peter Burchard, my former Board colleague has always made strong forays to curb bullying and that was exactly what he was trying to do when he passed t.109 domestically.
Where it went wrong was the size of the swing. We took a problem of degree (some coaches are too loud, too constant, too disruptive) and answered it with a prohibition of kind. Almost nobody in American fencing was asking for the tunnel-quiet of a World Cup DE. Plenty of people were asking for the guy three strips down to stop screaming and let the fencers fence.
There’s also a detail from that debate worth resurfacing, because it’s the most important thing anybody said and it got buried: in its comments on the proposal, the Referees’ Commission observed that referees already possess the means to enforce appropriate conduct, and that the rule change wouldn’t hand them any new tool. That’s the ballgame. The enforcement authority was never missing. The willingness to use it was.
And here’s the part I own. I won the vote in December 2023. I got the outcome I wanted. And then the conversation stopped…including, if I’m honest, on my end. We reaffirmed the permission and we never went back and defined the condition. That’s an unfinished job with my name on it.
My position: nuggets, not monologues
I think strip coaching during active fencing is fine when it is small and rare. “Distance.” “Footwork.” “One foot.” “Two-meter zone.” A word, a reminder, a correction that fits between two lights.
I think it stops being fine when it becomes continuous — and I’ve written about why at length. The short version: when a coach narrates the entire bout, the fencer isn’t solving the problem. The coach is, out loud, in real time, and the fencer is executing. That’s not coaching. That’s puppeteering, and it builds fencers who look sharp under supervision and fall apart the moment the strings are cut.
Two objections to the constant-voice model, one competitive and one human.
The competitive one. Fencing is a decision sport. The thing we are actually developing is a fencer’s ability to read an opponent and choose, under immense pressure, without help. In a recent interview with Direct Elimination (Simmons and Ewart) with 2020 Olympic Champ Romain Cannone, Cannone talked about how he was so focused and in the zone that he waved his coach away throughout the event.
Every touch where the answer arrives from the sideline is a touch where that capacity didn’t get exercised. Then the fencer gets to a Junior World Cup, or a college bout, or simply a NAC where you’re stuck covering two strips at once and the voice is gone. The fencers who cope are the ones who were already doing the thinking. If your fencer’s results drop noticeably when you go quiet, that isn’t evidence you should coach harder. That’s the diagnosis.
The human one. Volume is contagious and it isn’t neutral. A venue where six coaches are shouting continuously isn’t a venue where a twelve-year-old is having fun. It’s a pressure cooker, and the pressure isn’t coming from the opponent. It’s coming from the people who are supposed to be the safe part. I’ve watched kids look at their coach after a touch before they look at the light. That’s a child managing an adult’s emotions in the middle of a bout. We built that. And it’s a retention problem as much as a rules problem: nobody quits a sport because the fencing was too hard. They quit because the sideline was.
What I want: joint guidelines, not another ban
Here’s my ask as I transition away from the Board, and it’s deliberately modest.
The Referees’ Commission and the Coaches Committee should jointly publish guidance defining the boundary between permitted advice and disturbing the order of the bout. Not a rule change. A shared interpretation, agreed to by the people who enforce it and the people it’s enforced on, so that the same behavior gets the same answer in Cincinnati as it does in Portland.
The 2023 experience is the argument for doing it jointly. Guidance handed down to coaches got rejected in five months. Guidance built with them has a chance.
What “good” looks like — a starting draft, not a finished product
- —Short cues — one to three words, delivered occasionally
- —Tactical reminders that fit between touches, not during a phrase
- —Encouragement at a volume the fencer can hear, and not one decibel louder
- —In practice: anything the fencer on the next strip wouldn’t notice
- —Continuous instruction across a phrase or a bout once the ref calls “FENCE!”
- —Volume that carries to adjacent strips
- —Any comment directed at, about, or audible as a reaction to the referee’s calls
- —Coaching that visibly targets or rattles the opponent
- —Acting like an arse in general
- 1An informal word from the referee (e.g. “please coach between touches not during”) most situations should end here
- 2A formal warning to the coach/parent, documented as a Group III Yellow
- 3Lvl I Black Card for Disturbing Order
The escalation matters more than the definitions. Referees don’t enforce the condition in t.109 today because the only options that feel available are nothing or nuclear, and nobody wants to be the referee who ejected someone for jabbering when the t.109 exclusion applies.
The unglamorous conclusion
I don’t want the FIE rule here, and I don’t think most of you do either. We’ve had that debate and its overwhelming settled that the t.109 exception should remain in the United States.
But I’m no longer comfortable defending the American exception on the grounds that the alternative was worse. That isn’t a standard. It’s an excuse, and it’s the one we’ve been running on since my motion passed in December 2023.
We kept the exception. We haven’t yet earned it. Earning it means saying out loud what the condition attached to it actually requires, and then being willing to enforce that on people we know, like, and see at every NAC.
If we won’t do that, we shouldn’t be surprised when someone proposes the ban again. And next time it may pass and stay passed.
