The Weekly Warfare   Musings martial from across the SCA

I’ve been asked to elaborate on an idea I had not too long ago, and I’ve found that it coincides well with a few other ideas I’ve been fleshing out recently, so all of those things are being combined here.

First, a simple assertion: height, more specifically reach, is very advantageous to fencing. Yes? I think we can all get on board with that notion. To any short people who are getting grumpy with me: I’m 5’8”, and yes, you can craft a strategy to beat a taller opponent, but the fact of the matter is that if someone cloned me and gave that clone a meaningful reach advantage, I will not beat the clone. It would be equally skilled, and have a decisive advantage.

A second: athleticism matters, and the more you have, the better. Still with me?

Good. Let’s investigate this further, and see what we can uncover through examination.

The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition is something I’ve made reference to before, and I think that it remains a very useful tool for discussing a person’s relative skill level. The basic concept can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisition

The short version is that everyone is either a novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, or expert. If you take the time to read the descriptions (and you should, since I don’t want anyone getting confused later), they do a good job of connecting to martial arts skills, or any other skills that anyone might have. They are not, strictly speaking, indicative of performance, however, which is what I’ll be addressing soon enough.

If we take the Dreyfus Model, I think it is fair and reasonable to divide each level into 4 stages, and fairly easy to do so accurately. I say this based on my 11 years as a teacher: it is very easy to grade an essay and say, “This is an A, this is a B, this is a C,” but far less so to say, “This is a 76, and this is a 77.” Within each grade, it is similarly easy to say, “This paper is a B, but in the better half of Bs, and close to a low B than an A,” which would give us a top 50% B, but not a top 25% B. An 86 or 87, but not an 88 or 89.

Still with me? The skill levels divide the same way: “Jane is competent, but closer to proficient than advanced beginner. She is also not that close to proficient, so she’s in that top half of competency, but not the top quarter.”

Since this gives us a total of 20 skill levels to measure, we can represent that visually as follows:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
										J

Overall, this puts Jane at an 11 for the time being.

Fans of Thibault are going to be really excited soon.

The next concept I need to introduce is that of the “Boyd Belts,” which is the first topic in Ryron and Renner Gracie’s video, “Jiu-Jitsu Over 40”, found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGk_urw1_hA

I recommend watching the whole thing, as it’s all very important, but the relevant part for us is that in BJJ, age and weight matter a lot. The Boyd Belt is a recognition of that: if you are a 45 year old black belt and grappling with a 25 year old blue belt who also outweighs you by 70 pounds, that match is closer to even than just looking at skill would indicate. An Olympic champion wrestler at 126 pounds is going to struggle considerably against the last place 276 pounder, even if the skill levels are vastly different. Weight matters for that sport.

And reach matters for fencing! We already agreed to that, remember?

I happen to think it matters in 3 inch increments. I think this because my 42 inch blade won’t reach someone with a 45 inch blade, even if I do everything right, if they opt to neglect to parry and just yield in seconda around my quarta and counterattack: they haven’t defended themselves at all, but since the swords aren’t sharp, I get hit first and they might not get hit at all if they arrest my forward motion enough. Test it out if you don’t believe me.

In any case, I’m saying that 3 inches of reach is significant, and that’s why I’m using that number.

Let’s imagine, then, that Jane is fencing John, and they are both equally skilled. Jane is an 11, and John is an 11, so they go about 50-50 with each other. Jane goes and grabs a 45, so now she’s a 12 and John is still an 11, so she starts to win more. Maybe not too much more, but more. She’s now artificially more skilled than John.

John gets tired, and we have Bob step in, along with some other variables relevant to this bout: Bob is also using a 45, is 8 inches taller than Jane, and is 22 years old to Jane’s 40.

What does this mean for Jane? Well, she’s at a 12, remember? But Bob here has about 4 inches of extra reach in each arm, plus the extra 8 inches of height, for an overall reach advantage of 12 inches, which translates to 4 levels.

The 20 year gap in age… I’m not so sure, but I think I’d give 1 level per 5 years of youth: at 35, 30 and 40 seem very similar, but 20 seems sufficiently far away as to be worth a couple of levels. A good case exists for combining age with athleticism somehow, so I am open to ideas here.

Now we know that Bob is not coming into this on equal footing with Jane. She’s actually a more skilled fencer overall: Bob is a lower-end advanced beginner, at about a 6 on my scale up there. All else being equal, Jane will mop the floor with Bob.

All else being equal.

In reality, Jane, with her 45, is a 12. Bob, with his 45, height, and youth, starts out at 9 (height + blade + age, 4 + 1 + 4) and then gets to add his paltry 6 in skill to that to make him a 15! Jane is in trouble, and this is assuming she’s equally strong, athletic, etc.. There could be dozens of variables at play in reality, and the purpose of this is a rough approximation, not a hard, scientific calculation.

Jane is in trouble.

Fast forward a decade or so, and imagine that Bob has worked really hard to become an expert. Bob’s skill is now at a 20, but he’s still adding points for his height and reach. If Sally is also 30 years old and also at skill level 20, but is 5’1” to Bob’s 6’2”, Bob gets a free 7 points for his height (13 inches taller + 6.5 inches of arm length /3), and since Sally uses a 40 inch blade, Bob gets a total of 8 or 9 points on her, depending on how you want to round.

Sally versus Bob is a 20 versus a 29. It’s the same as if Sally met someone more physically equal, but with the skill level of Jane: an 11 versus a 20.

No matter how skilled you are, an opponent with equal skill will push their number higher and higher by being taller and more athletic. A 25 year old, 6’6” competitive gymnast with a skill level of 2 is going to blast past someone a foot shorter who is more typical in athletic conditioning, even if they’ve reached Competence.

What does this all mean for us? It means a few things, besides telling us things we already know about practice and genetic advantages.

Significantly, check out the average height of your White Scarves, OGRs, Bronze Rings, etc.: of the 59 in Atlantia, I think about 45 of them are taller than me, and most of them are above average male height. Most of the ones who are my height or shorter are women, who account for only 9 or 10 of the total number of White Scarves.

This is why this is a big deal: the standard SCA training method of “show up and spar” is detrimental to women as a byproduct of being detrimental to shorter people. This is true even if we remove all other considerations: socialization, athletic ability, athletic history, etc..

Our practices are terrible and actively contrary to every useful learning model. We know this. It’s not a debate that SCA practices are mostly really bad. These non-methods favor taller, stronger, and younger novices, since they start out incrementally ahead of all of the other level 1s. As a consequence, they have more early success, get more positive reinforcement, and get more encouragement and attention.

And the people who aren’t that get left behind and left out, or never start in the first place. Our lack of training hurts our growth because people who could become great never do.