Hilt and Helm Fall 2023 Summary
Since the last time I put out a blog post we’ve been super busy!
Harvest Fecht 2023
On September 2nd, Hilt and Helm Fencing club journeyed to the mystical land of Cincinnati Ohio for Harvest Fecht 2023. For those who aren’t aware Harvest Fecht is a lot like Funfecht in that its a sparring and camping weekend where people gather together to take classes from instructors throughout the HEMA community, eat excellent food, and free spar to their hearts content. Fighters are encouraged to keep track of how many other fighters they challenged and whoever fights the most other people gets inducted into the order of the broken blade. At the first Harvest Fecht in 2018, my instructor was the first to get inducted and I was the second the following year.
Me getting inducted into the “Order of the Broken Blade” at Harvest Fecht 2019.
The ceremony featured Ben Houck jumping into the pond and emerging from the water sword in hand to give it to that year’s winner. That part was promptly axed afterward because the pond is freezing cold, there are biting fish and gross chemicals in it, and getting out is a lot harder than it looks. Still though it was a great memory for me even if it was much less so for Ben.
To say that I have a lot of fond memories at this event would be an understatement. Check out my blog entry from last year. So I was really excited to be able to bring a bunch of my new club mates. Sadly I had to miss war in the woods since I had made a prior commitment to fight at Blood on the River. Still though I managed to make both commitments and get to Harvest Fecht just in time for dinner, which was an excellent taco bar with some mouth watering chicken and steak options. Julia, Auren, Robin, and I took our food to the dock where I got inducted and watched a really beautiful sunset. For each of them this was their first Harvest Fecht and it really meant a lot to me to be able to share that moment with them.
The next day I reprised my Rapier and Cape class which again was well received. I also managed to take a class by Johnathan Paulino, an A Tier fencer from Philadelphia who’s beaten me like the red headed step child of a rented mule every time we’ve fought. His class was on Vadi’s longsword, a fencing style that (like Fiore) places a great deal of emphasis on using downward deflection cuts to stymie your opponent’s attacks and immediately follow up with an attack on the same line. It’s one thing to learn from other A Tier fencers how they beat you and another to take those lessons to heart and apply them in the heat of a match. Here’s hoping the next time he and I fight things swing in my favor.
On the last day of the event, sadly none of my students followed in my footsteps to get inducted into the order of the broken blade, but someone really awesome did instead! Sean McCarthy became the next to be inducted into the Order of the Broken Blade. Although he wasn’t one of my students he did get one of my shirts.
Sean McCarthy: Winner of the Broken Blade at Harvest Fecht 2023
21+ Night at the Carnegie Science Center
On Friday September 8th, Hilt and Helm Fencing club had the rare honor of putting on a demonstration at the Carnegie Science Center’s 21+ Night: Fantasy Game Night. The evening featured a host of table top RPG tables, quests around the science center visitors could undertake, a comedy performance by The Knights of the Arcade, and a fencing demonstration by us! Before the evening, we’d looked back at our demonstration at Necromancer Brewery’s Pride event and realized that we needed to rehearse before hand to ensure everything went smoothly. We added a power point presentation with macros that allowed us to show each fighter’s score, highlighted what HEMA was and wasn’t, our accomplishments as fencers, as well as our events as a social club. Our good friends The Duelists (Randal and Mike) who perform at the Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival came to one of our rehearsals and gave us some advice. The gist of it boils down to: “Less Blab, More Stab”. Basically I was talking too much, so I figured out how to whittle down the talking parts. Also the fights were over in a flash. Sure trained fencers would be able to tell what was happening, but most of the audience would only ever see a whirl of blades and the word “halt” shouted over and over again. So we slowed down the fighting and turned up the theatricality. Our fighters focused on fighting in rhythm with the music, and making big flashy attacks so their opponent could see what was coming and have a better chance to parry and report. We also reused the roses from Pillowfecht 3 by giving them to the audience to throw at the fencer who stole their heart. To weigh them down, we duct taped washers to the bottom of the roses in either blue or orange so we could just count all the roses that fell on stage instead of tasking the audience with being able to aim.
The results were like night and day compared to our first demonstration. We ended the night with a standing ovation from the audience and sold a bit of merchandise as well! See the pictures below:
Duel for the Jewel 2023
On Saturday October 21st, Robin and I drove over to Cincinnati Ohio for “Duel for the Jewel 2023” run by Gem City Sword Guild. That weekend they had 5 events going on: Saber, Open Longsword, and Invitational Longsword on Saturday, and Messer and Side Sword on Sunday. This was Robin’s first tournament so I was happy to be there to support her. This was also my first side sword tournament. Back at AG Open, I mentioned that I saw REALLY sexy side sword from Seven Embers Forge for sale that in a moment of weakness I bought for myself. I’d gotten to play around with it at the club with Paul, but this was the first ever side sword tournament I’d seen and I wanted to get my money’s worth out of the thing.
They had an interesting ruleset: all clean hits were 2 points, but there was target priority in the case of doubles. In first priority were shots to the head and thrusts to the body. Below that were cuts the the body, and lastly were shots to the off hand. So if I hit an opponent in the head, but they cut by arm, I would get 1 point instead of 2. Or if I hit them in the sword hand and they hit me in the left hand I would get one point. If both hits were to the same target group, neither fighter would get any points. This ruleset was the same across all weapons which raised some hackles. There are plenty of rulesets, especially with messer, that wouldn’t count shots to the hand in order to get people to go in for grapples and deep targets and to prevent messer fights from turning into short saber fights. Personally I was never a fan of those rules so this was a breathe of fresh air to me. I’ll definitely steal this concept for future events.
Saber went along very well. Managed to win 3 of my 5 fights. One of my losses was to Brandon Zipplinger who has always been one of my toughest opponents. The other was to a fighter whose name escapes me, but he managed to get a really good head shot on my and knocked off one of my kydex pigtails on my mask. I let him keep it as well as a “Less Blab, More Stab” sticker now on sale on our website! It’s not everyday someone manages a good head shot on me. It’s only fitting to give them a souvenir. When eliminations came around I was unfortunately paired up against Robin. She fought valiantly and managed to get a good leg shot on me, but I had a medal to win and ended the fight 7 - 2. My next opponent I did not recognize. He was wearing a green and grey kaftan jacket (so he had style at least), but had no patches or markings what so ever. Figuring he was so unlucky fencer who’s signed up for more than he’d bargained for, I loaded my “Standard Mook” opponent strategy in my head and prepared to let him take the initiative so I could focus on parrying and reposting. Normally my opponents are slow enough that I can see their attacks coming from a mile away and I just have to keep distance until I see an opening and thrust in for an easy victory. Not this time though! This guy was much faster than I’d expected him to be. When I did take the initiative, he was much quicker on his parry repost game that I’d expected. By the time I realized how much better he was that I’d anticipated he was already up by 4 points. I shifted back into my A game strategy and managed to claw my way back by 3 points but by then it was too late. He’d managed 3 more points against me and knocked me out of the saber tournament.
After my loss, I talked with a good friend of mine Justin Hernandez who I’ve had some really impressive fights against and apparently the mystery fighter was one of his students: Aiden Sutter. I was so impressed by his skill that I gave him one of our newest stickers: The Narwal version of the Very Hard to Kill.
The Narwhal version of the Very Hard to Kill Series of Stickers.
Aiden would then go on to win bronze and Justin got silver, so it’s nice to see that good talent begets good talent!
1st: Branden Zipplinger
2nd: Justin Hernandez
3rd: Aiden Sutter
Afterwards there was Open and Tier A Longsword. For open Robin did exceptionally well. She lost her pool matches but she did make it through the first round of elimination! Would have liked to have been able to get footage but I was fighting in Tier A longsword at the same time.
For Tier A, they basically took the top 7 people from open longsword and put us in our own little pool. The contenders: Frank Zamary, JW Pugnetti, JJ Conlan, Tyler Dunham, Chris Yang, JJ Conlan, Branden Zipplinger, and me … Chris Shelton. Frank totally kicked my ass. A lot of my strategy revolves around keeping distance and waiting for my opponents to leave an opening for me to thrust into. Problem with Frank is that he doesn’t leave those types of openings. He knows my strategies, very rarely falls for my feints, and very rarely leaves openings for me to exploit. A super technical fighter, most time when I am able to best him I have to do so using pure speed and athleticism. Didn’t work out this time, but he’s always a fun fight. My other shut out was Tyler. When he and I fought at AG Open I came out on top. I figured I had his number and this would be a repeat of our last fight. I was wrong! Dude apparently was in a slump at that time and he leveled up tremendously. He cleaned my clock and I’ll have to look over our fight footage (if I can find it) to figure out a strategy for the next time. My other loss was to JW Pugnetti. Back when we were both at my old club, we fought each other enough for me to have a solid understanding of his fighting strategy and for him to know my strategy so I could feint my usual moves and outsmart him. Now he’s moved away and has his own Youtube Channel HEMA Fight Breakdowns. On his channel he examines videos of fights and discusses strategies that work and how they can be applied in your fights. Here’s a video he featured me in where he demonstrates “HEMA Prison Shanks”. Oh good … nice to be the uncredited shank victim! I suppose all publicity is good publicity.
JW would then go on to knock me out of elims and take silver in the event.
Tier A Longsword:
1st: Frank Zamray
2nd: JW Pugnetti
3rd: JJ conlon
The next day was Messer and Sidesword. Robin faired better this time then last scoring her first ever Messer tournament. Check out her first fight and first win here:
She would later get knocked out by Frank Zamary, the guy who won Gold in Invitational Longsword, but she put up a respectable fight!
Lastly but certainly not least was Sidesword. I had a bit of a headache that morning. Thankfully Robin had some Aleve hanging around. I’d later joke that it must have been laced with crack because I was on fire that day! Out of 11 fights I had that day, I won all 11 of them and took home my first ever gold medal! See my final fight below:
Of all my opponents, the one I want to call out is Tyland Steiner. He and I fought a grand total of 3 times throughout the tournament: twice in pools and again in the semi finals. The first time I loaded my standard mook move set and almost lost. I only vary narrowly squeaked out a win when our fight ended 6 to 7. After a brief break between the first and second round of pools I figured out how he was fighting and changed up my strategy. He was still a difficult opponent, but he’d gotten used to how I was fighting in the first round and my strategy shift (thankfully) threw him off in our next two fights. Still though, I had to push myself to fight harder, more cleanly, and with greater speed than I’d fought in ages thanks to him. Thankfully he managed to come away with his first ever medal and one of our new Narwhal “Very Hard to Kill” stickers for his efforts.
Sidesword:
1st: Chris Shelton
2nd: Thomas Kesler
3rd: Tyland Steiner
Pillowfecht 5: Stabbin’ to the Oldies
On October 28th, we reconvened for our quarterly in house tournament: Pillowfecht 5: Stabbin’ to the Oldies! This tournament was a whatever weapon you want tournament, as in as long as both opponents had the same weapon and appropriate protective equipment they could fight with whatever they wanted. The twist this time was that instead of me deciding the music, they got to “choose”. By that I mean that everyone participating got to submit a song into the queue between 2.5 and 3.5 minutes long and we’d put them all on shuffle. Fighters would fight until either one of them got 7 points or we reached the end of the song.
As you can probably imaging, giving people that much control over the music had … mixed results. A lot of it was pretty standard sword fighting music. There were some club bangers and a country song here or there. A sea shanty or two. But some maniac submitted a terrible 8 bit monstrosity of a song that sounded like the sound track from the original Oregon trail played via the dying gasps of a dial-up internet connection.
That song aside, the event was insanely fun! Check out our gallery of event photos. All photo credits go to our club photographer Paul Wintruba from Skrimshaw Media.
Congrats to our winners! Each of them get a “Less Blab, More Stab” poster or tickets to the Carnegie Science Center’s 21+ Night!
1st Place: Josh Derby
2nd Place: Constance Frazier
3rd Place: Kevin Brough and Ben Orr
On a personal note
Although there are a lot of photos, here’s two I’d like to bring your attention to if I may:
Here’s me at Pillowfecht 4
And me at Pillowfecht 5
Hopefully you noticed since Pillowfecht 4, I’ve become less of a man. Specifically 25 pounds less and counting! We share our training space with a personal trainer named Grayson Siatowsky who runs Fit Lyfe by Gray and he’s helped me get my old body back. I’ll admit after the break up with my old fencing club I became … rather depressed. I’d put so much effort into putting together my own fencing club that I stopped putting effort into myself. But thanks to Grayson for helping through my fitness journey and the staff at Hilt and Helm for taking a lot of the burden off my shoulders I’ve been able to get back to a weight I haven’t been in years.
No man (or woman) is an island. No matter how hard you work there’s certain things you just can’t accomplish by yourself. I’m grateful every day for all of the people in my life that have helped make this club possible. It’s enriched my life in ways I never could have thought of and given people a community that’s welcoming and inclusive. I just want to thank everyone who’s helped make it possible.
Up coming events and news
We have the Unicorn Cup coming up in January 20th 2024. Please join us for our first ever for-real-zies fencing tournament. Also not sure if you’ve noticed by we got a new logo! As much as I loved the old logo, it was very busy. Especially for getting it printed on water bottles and things which couldn’t handle that level of color or complexity. So we won’t throw the old one away, but at least now we have options.
New logo, who dis?
Featuring our new mascot, the swordicorn!
We’re also planning to finish cleaning up the back room to expand our storage area. Once we have a bit more space we’re looking to swap out some of our old weapons with some newer ones. Stay tuned for future updates!
