In addition to all of the tournaments running over the weekend, we’ve also invited some amazing instructors that will be teaching classes and workshops!

Instructors

Marlene Hurst (She/Her & They/Them)

Instructor Bio:

Marlene began her HEMA practice in 2016 with Capital Kunst des Fechtens (CKDF). She is Committee Chair of the CKDF Council, an instructor for Longsword and Ringen. She has guest lectured at DanceFight 2022, Fecht Yeah 2019, and participated in Esfinges' Instructor Symposium in 2020. She is a decorated practitioner having won Gold for Paired Technique with Charles Lin at Everything Else Event in 2019, Champion Overall in the U175 weight class for the 2019 Mid-Atlantic Historical Wrestling League, and took Gold in Women's Longsword at Capitol Clash in 2020. Marlene is a respected HEMA judge, and is one of only a handful of women to referee Ringen having done so at Longpoint in 2019.

Class Topic: Body Fluency Through Movement

Everyone has a level of body fluency. My goal with the "Body Fluency Through Movement'' class is to build / expand participant fluency through exploratory movements. Participants will discover how our body's various muscle groups work together to achieve even the simplest movements. Participants are encouraged to wear clothing they are comfortable moving in, additional kit is not required.

Mariana Lopez (She/Her)

Instructor Bio:

Mariana Lopez is a founder and head coach of the Metropolitan Historical Fencing Academy (MHFA) and has 15 years of Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) experience. A highly accomplished competitor with various gold medals amongst a number of weapons she’s also a tournament organizer and referee in both North America and Europe, and a former member of the Mexican National HEMA Championships committee. Having a strong passion for art she has also partaken in a multitude of art projects related to HEMA, creating reproductions, illustrations for books, fencing manuals restoration, and other visual resources. As an International Relations major Mariana founded Esfinges, an international organization with thousands of members dedicated to the support and promotion of woman’s participation in HEMA.

David Rowe (He/Him)

Instructor Bio:

David Rowe is a founder and head instructor at the Metropolitan Historical Fencing Academy and has more than 20 years of fencing, competing, refereeing, event organization, and coaching experience and is a decorated national and international competitor in a variety of weapons and disciplines. David studied at Catholic University researching the transcription, translation, and interpretation of medieval manuscripts is a producer of the Into the HEMAverse podcast, and organizer and tournament director for the Capitol Clash and King's Cup Tournament & Workshops.

David teaches Bolognese Swordsmanship, Liechtenauer tradition, German Ringen (Wrestling), 17th century Italian rapier, and French Smallsword and Saber, and his favorite topic is fencing theory, tactics, and sport psychology.

Outside of HEMA David enjoys playing guitar, making music, and spending time with his pugs.

Veronica Young (She/Her)

Instructor Bio:

Veronica Young's main focuses in HEMA have been threefold: Competing, fostering a better environment for under-represented genders in HEMA, and teaching.

Veronica serves as one of the Assistant Instructors at the Atlanta Historical Fencing Academy (AHFA) in Atlanta, GA. She also founded and leads the resource group called 'Arc' at AHFA, for underrepresented genders to promote good club culture and to provide a focused training environment. She most recently won the Gold medal in Women’s Longsword at SERFO 2022 and placed 23rd overall in Open Longsword at SERFO 2022.

Class Topic: How to Meyer Quarterstaff

This class will be an introductory lesson into Joachim Meyer’s Quarterstaff from his manual, “The Art of Combat” (1570.) You’ll learn the basics of the weapon as well as some of the plays from staff as well. Staves will be provided!

July 7, 2022

Jason Barrons

MCHO 22 Early Bird Registration is open!

July 7, 2022

Jason Barrons

Registration is now open, and early bird is available for $25 off until July 18th!

Go here to register: https://smoothcomp.com/en/event/8150

For MCHO 2022, pricing is all-inclusive: pay your base registration and you can sign up for as many events as you want. Are you eligible for 3 longsword divisions and king of the hill? Go for it! Just want to do saber and the skill course? Have at it!

Also included in the registration fee is our event shirts:

February 16, 2020

Jason Barrons

How we're making our beginner's tournament more accessible

February 16, 2020

Jason Barrons

Entering into your first HEMA tournament can be a daunting undertaking, especially if you’re not used to competitive environments. Emotions can run high, hopes can be dashed, and reality can be sobering.

We want to make our beginner’s tournament more friendly, accessible, and approachable, and we have a couple of tweaks to the formula we want to talk about with you.

The first big change is that we’re making the beginner pools themed by familiarity. Teens will be grouped together, fencers over 6 foot will be grouped together, etc. We’ll do this for as many reasonable groupings as we can find. In eliminations, all fencers will be brought back together to fence one another. Additionally, the top fencer from each group will receive an award.

We hope that these small changes will help fencers better understand what they can work on to improve and provide a more positive experience to people who may perhaps be competing for the first time in their lives.

February 16, 2020

Jason Barrons

Early Bird Starts March 6th!

February 16, 2020

Jason Barrons

Early bird registration will start on March 6th for MCHO 2020, and will last until March 31st.

Early bird reduces the price of base registration to $70 per person. After early bird ends, the cost of base registration will rise to $90 per person.

Additionally, during the period of early bird women can register for the women’s longsword tournament FOR FREE. We wanted a way to celebrate Women’s History Month and provide an incentive for more women to register, and we couldn’t think of a better way.

December 4, 2019

Jason Barrons

MCHO 2019: Feedback and Analysis

December 4, 2019

Jason Barrons

DHFA is big on feedback - after every event we ask for feedback, and every 3 months we have a club meeting to solicit things we can improve. MCHO is no different, and we wanted to share the results of the feedback survey we put out for 2019. We also believe in transparency, which is why we’re sharing with you.

I do want to clarify that we only had 37 people who filled out the feedback form - a healthy percentage, but could skew the results a tad.

What people liked the LEAST about MCHO 2019

In order of weight:

Judging (27%)
Awards Dinner (16.2%)
Ruleset (16.2%)
Open Sparring on Sundays (13.5%)
Directors (13.5%)
Ring Size and number of rings (10.8%)
Technology (10.8%)
Finals format (all bronzes matches first, gold matches second) (10.8%)

Interesting how Judging was the #1 thing, but director was down the list at #5. We had a 1+1 format, and the director was the final arbiter on calls. To be fair, a large majority of comments in this section were along the lines of “Great event, but I had to pick things,” so take it with a grain of salt.

Let’s take a look at some of the feedback about these:

The judging/directing wasnt bad but probably the weakest part of the tournament. Calls on quality and elbow shots were inconsistent. Impressed that the judges DID NOT seem biased towards particular fencers.

But calls were inconsistent between rings, and deviated pretty significantly from the provided rules. More experience, training and rest time for judges/directors.

I loved the judging format, but I feel by the end of the tournament the quality starting going down. I definitely am interested in reviewing the video to see if I was crazy on what I felt or thought happened in several instances. I believe more rest and rotation of judges would alleviate this.

Takeaways

‘Quality’ is one of the most inconsistent metrics we use to judge strikes, and while this is a common complaint at tournaments, we’ve got some work to do in order to make that consistent. We’ll be publishing explainer videos this year that will go over the more nuanced parts of the ruleset, such as quality, so that way everyone has a better understanding of the intent and rubric for scoring.

Deviation from the rules was only brought up by this one person, and they didn’t provide any examples, but it still is an issue of consistency that we’ll be fixing.

Rest for directors and judges is a important topic, however. Our goal was to run 2019 with as few outside volunteers as possible. however, with the sheer number of matches, this meant that judges and directors were EXHAUSTED by the end. For 2020, we will be opening up judge and director registration - the goal will still be to keep outside volunteers lower, but to make sure we can have as many fresh eyes as possible during pools and eliminations.

What people liked the MOST about MCHO 2019

In order of weight:

Fencing Talent (64.9%)
Venue (51.4%)
Technology (45.9%)
Ruleset (32.4%)
Video recording of all fights (29.7%)
Judging (21.9%)
Skills Course (21.9%)

Some comments to hightlight:

The judging in this tournament had very few mistakes.

I enjoyed the skills course, there was a ton of talented fighters, the venue was very nice and the shirts looked great. I was impressed how closely the schedule was followed.

I like the two judge format. I also really like the open discussion and explanation from the judges. There were problems which I will detail below. I was really surprised at the talent that came out to participate. It made for a very challenging weekend. I thought the tech made it very easy to follow the matches. I had friends watch who knew nothing about fencing, and the scoring display really helped them enjoy it more. For schedule, everything ran smoothly, more so than any other tournament I've been to.

The skills course took a lot of people by surprise, and we had a number of people ask to sign up after they saw the format. For those of you who don’t know, we created an obstacle course that tested your technique and skill with a longsword.

We’re really happy with the venue as well, which is why we’re going back there for 2020! Clean, state of the art, showers…it’s got everything.

It makes us happy to see that the fencing talent was something people appreciated, and it led to some RIVETING fights. In fact, for 2020, we have a plan for bringing in even more top-tier fencers; follow our facebook page for future announcements.

Let’s take a look at judging quality in more detail:

Judging & Directors in the Pools

Accuracy: 5 out of 7 (13 responses)
Consistency: 6 out of 7 (15 responses)
Clarity and Explanation: 6 out of 7 (15 responses)

Not bad! Accuracy is the least positive, but still overall something we’re pleased with. As mentioned before, there’s still a lot of work to do.

Directors and judges were instructed to have open, deliberate dialogue in front of the fencers, so that way the fencers could understand the reasoning behind the call itself. While there were some instances of side-discussions, it was kept to a minimum.

Judges & Directors in Eliminations

Accuracy: 5 out of 7 (10 responses)
Consistency: 6 out of 7 (13 response)
Clarity and Explanation: 6 out of 7 (16 responses)

While the overall consensus was consistence, a couple of people did feel that quality of judging went down in eliminations, and that’s reflected here. It’s important to us to figure out how to make it more consistent between the two rounds for all of our events.

Tournament Ring Feedback

We went with the Slovakian style of ring format - a 4mx8m(15ftx30ft) rectangle with starting lines about 3m(12ft) apart. This allowed us to keep time between exchanges low, and move through our eliminations quickly. We’ll be using it again next year.

There were enough people who felt they were a bit too narrow, and next year we’re considering a layout change to give the rings even more space if we can pull it off.

Skills Course Feedback

This is interesting feedback - the Zwerch station (you had to cut horizontally at two targets that were close together, strike the intended target without hitting the other target, and then cut around for the second target) was the simplest - what went wrong?

In the feedback, we saw a number of people state the the targets were inconsistently re-attached to their posts - some were firmly planted, others lightly attached. This meant that some people couldn’t complete the cut, even though power levels were not what we were trying to score against.

Our attack, parry, riposte station was the favorite, and is going to see some cool expansions next year (you had to provoke, then parry a counter attack, and then complete a final riposte to another target).

Slalom Cutting is going to need some improvements - it needs to match the intended skills better (fluidity of movement and efficiency with the blade).

The biggest thing we need to change about the skills course next year is that we weighted accuracy too heavily over speed. Some people literally could walk through the course to get the highest score. We want there to be tension between the skill, and the need to move quickly.

We’ll be sharing some other choice quotes in the future as we talk about improvements we plan on making to the entire event. Everyone who gave us feedback will be receiving a $30 discount code to next year - feedback is the only way we can improve, and we have every intention on making MCHO a world class event.

November 29, 2019

Jason Barrons

Welcome to the new MCHO Website!

November 29, 2019

Jason Barrons

We’ve just gotten started with MCHO 2020 planning, and there’s a long road ahead. We wanted to provide information as early and often as possible, and this website is the best vehicle for us to do so!

Workshop & Vendor Submission pages are now up - if you wish to have a table at MCHO or submit a workshop, now you can!

Early bird registration will be opening soon - watch our facebook page or this blog for the announcement.

We can’t wait to see you at MCHO 2020.