The British Fencing National Academy is now into its third year, nearly 400 fencers have benefitted from the expertise of a wide variety of coaches. Nearly 40 fencing coaches and 35 others sports experts have been involved. The common aim is to prepare British fencers for future international success.

Latest information can always be found at http://www.britishfencing.com/academy/

Recent activities

International Winter Training Camp

A total of 60 fencers travelled to 2 international training camps between Christmas & New Year, in Rome and La Rochelle.

Regional Training Days

The Regional weekend in January saw the most fencers taking part so far with over 150 fencers. These events were in Birmingham, Brunel, SUNEE, Northern Ireland and Bristol.

National Residential Training Weekends

Over 90 fencers, including all those who are part of the AASE programme and our National junior and cadet teams for the European and World Championships, took part in training weekends at Brunel University in February and Loughborough University in March.

These weekends were supported by 16 fencing coaches, 4 team managers, 4 strength and conditioning coaches, a nutritionist, a sports psychologist, and a physiotherapist.

The National Academy Strength and Conditioning programme has now been running for 20 months, results are now clearly visible from these last 2 training weekends and many fencers are moving on to more advanced levels. 

British Fencing has bought 4 sets of highly sophisticated video analysis equipment. These 2 weekends were the first time these were used by the coaches and fencers and were very powerful coaching tools, these are now going to be used at the National Academy regional centres in Birmingham, Bristol, Brunel & Sunee.

The weekend in March was also combined with the British and England Fencing Club, Coach and Volunteer Conference and a level 3 refereeing course.

Future Activities

Regional Training

The next regional training day will be on the 22^nd April. This will now include a new region in Scotland, led by Olympic fencer Don McKenzie. Full information and application forms for all regional sessions are on the British Fencing web site at http://www.britishfencing.com/academy/academy-talent-development/

Summer Residential Training

This year the Summer residential will be split over two venues. We have agreed to run part of the National Academy alongside the existing training camp organised by Jon Willis and Haverstock Fencing Club in Tauberbischofsheim. We’re grateful to Jon Willis for being our lead athlete mentor at previous Summer camps and are pleased to be able to announce this new partnership with the British Fencing National Academy. We’re pleased to announce that we will be one of the first groups to stay in the new accommodation block that has just been built at Nottingham Trent University, this will bring the accommodation up to the standards of the food and the training facilities we experienced last year.

We will now have 120 spaces in Nottingham for foil and sabre fencers and 48 spaces for epee fencers in Tauber.

These training camps will form a key part of the training year for all the fencers supported to be part of the National Academy by the AASE & TASS schemes.

International Training Camp, Rome December 2011

One of the benefits that has come from the National Academy is a collection of resources that can be downloaded and used by fencers and coaches to support their future training. These are on the British Fencing web site at http://www.britishfencing.com/academy/academy-resources/.