Introduction

Fencing has a problem. Everybody wants to play with swords, but few of the myriad d’Artagnan and Obi-Wan wannabes make the leap from wrapping paper tubes and plastic light sabers to competitive fencing. And for all too many of us who do find the sport, the discovery is often accidental.

My own family’s experience was pretty typical. Shortly after the release of the 1988 Mask of Zorro, our local paper ran what was essentially a “Look, real live people play with swords in clubs here in this very city!” story, complete with contact information for the then-two local clubs. “Mom!” said my almost 14-year-old daughter, “I’ve always wanted to do that, but I never asked because I figured there wasn’t any place around where I could.” We were lucky—the first club we found turned out to be a good one, and within a few months, we were well and truly hooked on the sport. But without that movie prompting that newspaper article, it might never have occurred to us to even look for a fencing club.

So how do we convert all that natural swordplay into awareness of the competitive sport?

Sponsorships, say some. All US Fencing has to do is get some big-money corporate sponsors, and the money from those sponsorships will fund the major training programs we need for our national teams. But there’s a slight hitch: what’s in it for those big sponsors? Sponsors are looking for attention—and a market for their products. They want to invest in sports that are visible and popular, while we want sponsorships in order to make fencing more visible and more popular. Were the USFA to double or even triple its membership, say, in an Olympic year when the U.S. brings home six medals, our sport would still be a niche sport, attracting nowhere near the numbers pulled in by swimming and gymnastics.

So what are we to do? Are we stuck with our relative invisibility within the sports world, doomed to perpetual obscurity? Of course not. It’s not only the national office or the USFA board of directors or national committees who can and should promote our sport—it’s every division, every club, every tournament organizer, every individual fencer who can help raise awareness of the sport within their own communities.

The work we need to do at the local level is a combination of word-of-mouth networking, traditional publicity efforts with press releases and media lists, and what PR consultant and author Jay Conrad Levinson calls “guerilla marketing”—using every possible tool at our disposal to communicate our message.

This guide is intended to help provide some of those tools at the grass-roots level of fencing—clubs, divisions and sections, and regional tournaments. It’s for anybody looking for a basic, no-frills guide to promoting their specific endeavors as well as competitive fencing generally. Many fencing clubs are already doing some of what we suggest, but almost all could—and should—do more.

Marketing and promotion at this level takes a lot of time and energy, often more than most fencing coaches and managers and organizers have to devote beyond the enormous amount of work that fencing organizations already demand of them. This is one area where it pays to canvass your members—and their parents and friends—to find supporters with the time and energy to help out. Ask for the help you need and be specific: If you ask generally for volunteers to help with publicity, you’re likely to get a couple of parents nodding vaguely as their kids gather up their belongings to leave; if you ask a specific person for help writing a specific news release this particular week, you’re more likely to get the positive, active response you need.

Fencing’s a Sport? aims to provide you with a few fundamental tools to get you going. Part 1 starts with the basics of creating a visual identity, developing and using a logo, and writing for public consumption (and why getting those fundamentals right is important). In Part 2, we focus on the single most important tool you have for reaching the public: your website. We look at what makes a good website, and what drives visitors away, and talk about what information your website should provide. Part 3 tackles that traditional tool of publicity, the press release, and how to use it, along with a few other tools for dealing with the press and media. In Part 4, we look at some of those “guerilla” means to reach the public, working through youth groups, business associations, and other community organizations. Finally, you’ll find in the appendixes a bibliography of useful references—books, magazines, and websites—and a collection of sample news releases.

You’ll probably notice that many of the examples and samples I’ve included are from the Sacramento Fencing Club. That’s because I spent more than five years doing publicity work for that club, including for its service as the local organizing committee for several North American Cups and two Summer Nationals. For future editions of this guide, I’d like to include ideas and examples from all over the country, so please feel free to send any material you’d like to see added.

For this edition, I’m grateful to the scores of individuals within the fencing community who’ve helped me learn about the sport as a parent, as a club volunteer, as a division and section officer, and as a tournament official. Most especially, I thank Kalle Weeks, Tanya Brown, Jerry Benson, Brad Baker, Christine Simmons, Kathy Schifferle, Cindy Bent Findlay, Gerrie Baumgart, and the inimitable Carla-Mae Richards.

Mary Griffith
marygriff@mac.com
September 2008

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