EBFGer Tournaments this past weekend . . .

We had three tournaments this past weekend at our gym – VAXE, VAWE, and VAMF.

Our first event of the day was the VAXE. OK, this is just a really fun group of people. And we had one entrant in his late sixties. Now, I ask you, what is cooler than that?

Lots of great "stingers" in this tournament – that's what I call those touches where you don't even see the person's arm move, and the light goes off. John McGrew was absolutely wicked with this move. The gym was packed with 37 (that's right, 37) fencers. Stuart Kaufman looked around, left, and came back with a caffeinated beverage for me. It was greatly appreciated and well-used.

Michael Perka came in first and David Katz came in second. We held four of the top eight places in the tournament with Jonathan Jeffries and Mark Wheeler tying for third, Michael Albrecht coming in fifth (or is that fourth?), and John McGrew taking eighth. And, seeing as they were the sum total of our entrants for that tournament, I'd say that's pretty darn good.  

Then we had VAWE. Now, again, this was my kind of tournament. Keith ran the whole thing from pools to DEs to finals. He could do this because the sum total of entrants was . . . three. Everyone wins! Everyone gets a medal! Yay! So Beth Slikas came in first, Suzanne Bloomer came in second, and Anna Estrada came in third. We didn't have any entrants, but everyone had a good time and they all praised their Director to the sky.

In fact, we had lots of compliments about our directors for these tournaments, so let me list them now, and thank them. Jim Liebich and Keith Lichten, thank you, truly, for helping me out so much. I couldn't have done this one without you guys. And Billy Carson, Mike Slater, Todd Russell, and Beau Mitchum – you guys did such a great job keeping everything running smoothly, fairly, and well.

OK, back to tournaments! Our last one was VAMF. What a crowd! We had 22 fencers, including two of ours, with Pam Rohrich and Javier Arizmendi, in his first-ever tournament. We also had some of the people from the VAME fencing in this tournament, meaning they were fencing all day. My hat is off to them! Pam took 22^nd and Javier took 21^st in a tournament filled with rated fencers. Nice work, you two!

And that about wraps it up for this edition of "As The EBFGers Fence . . ."