Cordelia Cross, Media Content Creator at Kings Oxford, fills us in on a taster fencing session!
On the 11th of October, Kings Oxford offered its first in-school fencing taster session! Local expert and talented swordsman Mr Simon Mandarino led the session coming in especially to meet our students, and gauge interest as well as potential talent. With just eight spaces available for both our campuses it was a battle as to who could sign up the quickest! The session gave students a rare opportunity to try out this ancient, noble form of sword fighting and well as gain a greater understanding of the sport. It is the perfect chance to develop a new sport and some basic sword skills.
After a somewhat entertaining but necessary warm-up, the students put on their safety gear which included gloves, protective masks and traditional white fencing jackets. The group was now ready to start learning some basic but technical, tactical movements, this included learning how to efficiently and smoothly move back and forth, then moving on to other more advanced offence and defence techniques.
After an hour of learning and practicing these movements in both attack and defence always rotating your pairs, Simon suggested a mini tournament to finish the session whereby everyone got the chance to match each other, gradually whittling it down to our two finalists to duel it out to see who would become our winner! We had two very successful candidates – Dion and Riley who both showed tremendous improvements throughout the session and certainly weren’t afraid of some friendly competition as they went head-to-head making it to the final round.
Feedback from the students who attended was hugely positive and they all left on a high, keen to be given the opportunity to try it again. Given the extremely positive feedback, it's now decision time as to whether we offer this as part of our Enrichment Programme. Well done to everyone who joined the session and well done for all trying something new! Let’s hope we get to offer another session before the end of term; you never know we might end up with our very own Kings Oxford fencing squad!
Kings Colleges across the UK offer an amazing range of extracurricular activities. Check out the video to find out more!
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