For this passion blog I will be talking about our home meet. Yes I know it doesn’t really count as a travel blog however it is an interesting process. Every year Penn State hosts two tournaments the Penn State dual meet and the Garret Open. Both of these competitions are held at the white building either in the gyms upstairs or the basement where we generally practice. Yes we practice in the basement because we aren’t football RIP.

The Penn State team hosts so we are required to set everything up ourselves from media coverage to strips being set up. Generally there isn’t much of an audience besides our sponsors and other fencing teams and parents however for the Dual Meet we always advertise with flyers, radio announcements, and anything else we can think of because we fence our rivals Columbia. Columbia has been NCAA champs for the past two years and we plan to take them down which I find ironic as my best friend is on that team.

The preparation is generally ore of an annoyance than anything because it requires us to come in on our free time and set up tables, posters, and strips. Setting up strips isn’t hard its just time consuming as they don’t always fit together well or the coaches may want us to redo the entire thing which happens frequently. The team always jokes about the coaches and their sexism as they always assign “women’s work” (don’t worry they don’t actually say that) which consists of either being a human paperweight or putting posters up while all the guys on the team have to actually work. After strip set up we always try to have a group team dinner and this past time we did it as a giant potluck. We all had to bring an assigned food item and it was one of the best team bonding moments of the year.

The day of the tournament is always crazy as we don’t have to move but we fence like ten teams in one day. There is always a squad of parents who bring a crap ton of food and basically baby us whenever we need anything which is amazing. If you are part of the team but not fencing we are required to “dress for success” and help host or referee matches. Dressing for success is business casual I believe however as a freshman I am still figuring it out.

After the tournament we have to clean the gyms of trash and then have to undo all of our hard work and start to take strips down. This isn’t always bad as we start to slowly take them down before the tournament is completely finished to try and be ahead of schedule.

I hope this helped give a bit of an overview of home meets and I invite all of you to come out and see us next year. We are hosting NCAAs next year and it will be super exciting!