Curacao is a beautiful Caribbean island with a population of about 140,000, extremely limited resources, and some of the best Little League Baseball players in the world. They qualified for the Little League World Series every year from 2001-2009, winning the title in 2004, and taking second in 2005. Eleven players from Curacao have gone on to play Major League ball. Curacao is a...

Alexandr Romankov is often remembered for his ten World Championships and five Olympic medals, and is generally considered one of the greatest fencers in history. However, what is often overlooked--and, perhaps, is far more interesting--is that Romankov's early fencing career was unexceptional. He spent many years without any great success in the sport. Romankov, however, loved fencing and...

The arcade game boom of the 1970s and 80s was fading and interest in video games was waning when the entire industry was suddenly jolted back into relevance with the appearance of Capcom's Street Fighter II in 1991. Though the invention of the two-player fighting game is often traced back to Tim Skelly's 1979 dueling game Warrior, it wasn't until...

In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi writes, "In battle, if you make your opponent flinch, you have already won." This idea is at the heart of tactics in fencing. In order to control an opponent and properly frame the bout, fencers have to be able to do more than just respond to their opponents' choices. They must force their opponents...

In 1988, the Berkeley swim team took part in an unique experiment. Each swimmer was asked to swim one of his (or her) best events as fast as he could. Their coaches then told them that their times were slightly worse than they actually were. After a sufficient rest, the swimmers were then asked to swim again. While some of the athletes performed the same, others did much better, and others--even some of the team's stars--did far worse than...

An important sign of an athlete's maturity and confidence is his ability to set goals. The only real goals of a child learning to fence is (rightly) to learn something new and have fun. He may dream of one day becoming Olympic Champion--and such dreams are important for...

In 1974, Muhammad Ali met George Foreman in a fight in which Foreman was heavily favored. Foreman was younger, he was a stronger puncher, and he had previously demolished Joe Frazier (against whom Ali had earlier lost)...

One of the most challenging types of students for a coach to work with is the "learned helpless" fencer. "Learned helplessness" is a problematic series of beliefs in which the student sees his successes and failures exclusively as the result of external factors. He has learned--due to earlier experiences...

A friend of mine--a former Olympian who has recently become a full-time coach--was lamenting recently that his students (all youth fencers) weren't getting competitive results. Between the pressures from the club owner, his students' parents, and his own pride, he was becoming very frustrated that the group...

Perhaps the most important principle of training--one which is possibly overlooked more than any other and which has a tremendous impact on the art, science, and business of coaching--is that, in order to be most effective, everything that happens during a fencer's training should be...