Introducing ‘Ultimate Fighter Lochac (UFL)’! The idea is that three unbelted combatants are teamed up with a Knight, who they normally would not train under, who then prepares them for a variety of combat competitions in six months time.
There has been a reasonable amount of interest in this project and the predictable amount of trash talking for those who tend to that sort of thing. I am however a bit unsure of what to make of it.
I think have being assigned three people and then having six months to work with them is not going to produce any serious changes to their levels of skill and technique. How many sessions are we realistically going to get in this time?
What is the purpose of the tournament/completion at the end of the six months? Is it to gauge participant’s improvement? This is probably better done as we already judge performance as gradual growth of skills, confidence and understanding in what the student is doing.
Is the final completion to pad the ego’s of the trainers or some of the participants in the ‘winning team’? I am sure this is not the case.
If the idea of UFL is to give some people better access to some of the Chivalry to exchange ideas and maybe learn a little on the way then this is a good thing. But this brings me to another issue.
I am uncomfortable in being assigned anyone’s squires or students. It would be highly likely I would be imparting very particular techniques and way of doing things and I would not want my ideas to be countering what their own Knight is teaching them. This would just lead to confusion and students getting annoyed and Knights being pissed off.
I have had a few people say that this is not such an issue. I am not sure of this. Our combat forms are not as interchangeable as many would pretend. I do not think it is a good thing to mix and match techniques. Try for example reconciling Duke Paul’s school with the Duke Brannos A-frame techniques… There are major and fundamental differences in play. One style will not necessarily mesh well with a style that does things too differently.
I am also going to have to admit that I am not keen about some of my students picking up what I would see as bad habits. Again this is the sort of thing that will just cause confusion and people getting annoyed. This may be ego on my part or just a level of hubris on what I have to say.
As you may have guessed, I have agreed to participate in UFL, despite some of my reservations. I think the final completion is possibly counterproductive but if it motivates more people to train more than it is not all bad. I am hoping that the entire project gives a large range of people some additional ideas and motivation. Maybe it will lead to some people being exposed to other teachers rather than just the ones in their local group. If UFL enables many of the participants to improve what they do then this is a project that will be very worthwhile, and a credit to the person who came up with the idea and is putting in the work to make it happen.
Cornelius Von Becke 
Greetings,
With regard to the training of another’s students:
This is something that fencers tend to run into. I have found that there are two approaches that can be taken: 1) you can attempt to change the person’s style to suit what is specifically in your system; or 2) you can see what a person is doing within their system and based upon the principles of combat modify to improve what they already do. From my own personal experience I have found that the second approach is more beneficial to the process than attempting to re-write what they have been taught. Indeed the second process allows me to examine what I know of the art and learn something of how the principles are applied to a different approach.
With regard to the whole concept if the UFL:
Why is it necessary to change the students over? What is trying to be learnt from the experience? Is it the skill of the students as fighters or the skills of the teachers as teachers which is on show? Personally I would not change the teachers, but merely set a defined amount of tournaments with points accruing for placement in each tournament with a final tournament for the top four to compete in for the final prize. But I may be simplifying the process too much.
Cheers,
Henry.
Henry has a good point with #2. You aren’t necessarily being asked to rewrite each fighter’s DNA. Yes you will have to bite your tongue somewhat, but you also have a chance to work on diplomatically showing the student a number of different ways of achieving goals without sledging your brothers in arms.
As someone with a great deal of experience with the MMA version of the concept, there are a number of opportunities. All of which are contingent upon the combatant turning up a lot. Not this once a week crap. The guys in the show are, of course, full time pros, training 4 hours a day then resting and talking game and trash for the other half of the day.
Your first opportunity is development of game plans. Each fighter in the original MMA show knows their next opponent, being one on one combat, and can develop a game plan accordingly. Do you wrestle, do you stand up, do you go to the ground. What are the SCA equivalents, given that tournies are multi-opponent? Learning your own strengths better than ever before because you are being seen through fresh yet experienced eyes, and thus being able to know yourself better and create attack and defense plans better.
Secondly, you have the chance to condition your student to a far higher level, with pell time, time in armour and also with sport-specific and general attacks on their cardio and lactic endurance.
You also have the chance to involve fun, ways of keeping everyone’s attention, games and challenges that can usefully use the tensions between relative strangers that might otherwise get toxic.
It hinges on each coach and each student being professional in their approach, turning up and meeting all commitments, and doing make-up sessions for anything they have missed, and reliably doing set fitness and skills homework unsupervised or with buddies.
It will allow a chance to cross pollinate ideas and get to know opponents a bit better, and might be a good vaccine against interhousehold bullshit and rumours that the SCA is so prone to.
Pete/Cormac.
Pete – You are spot on. What I plan on doing is largely going to depend on how much ‘face time’ I can get witht he students sent in my direction. I will probably be focusing a lot on conditioning and some fundamental (read – more martial arts) approches to training than the standard SCA mucking about.