I visited the SCA event “Sport of Kings” today and observed a few sessions on SCA fighting presented by various high ranking long time Knights. I was pleased to hear there seems to be something of a movement within their organization to better formalize training, changing from the format of “thrown into combat, learn from your beatings” to “instruction, repetitive practice, and implementation in combat”. On the flip side, however, there was recognition that the strikes they make are meant to be most effective as blunt force impact, not as cutting technique.
Some other take-aways I had were:
* Additional vetting of the mechanics of rotational velocity, arcs, and “cracking the whip” to generate maximum sword tip energy. Use large radius arcs that are then changed to short radius arcs to increase rotational velocity, or put more mundanely, stop your arm near the end of your swing but permit the sword to continue (which causes a change in fulcrum and corresponding increase in rotation).
* OODA – Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. This is something that we effectively teach in the WCoS as well, but I do not recall encountering this specific acronym, which is a good addition/expansion on what I teach to my students. This roughly corresponds to how the WCoS teaches cutting, minus the observation which we break out separately, in that we instruct to circle (or pull back), choose target, and cut.
I know there were more, but at the moment this is all that I can actively recall while sitting in my computer chair. If others come back to mind, I’ll try to add them.
The final part of the day I was able to observe some of their Sport of Kings tourney, which was mostly what I was expecting, in that there was a lot of what I would consider bludgeoning and flailing. None the less, I intend to seek out a couple of the local Baronies fighter training days to see how they training and make contacts to decide whether to pursue a heavy fighter certification for next years Pennsic Wars per Head Kaiden Gad’s request.