Fencing SYFA-South Youth Fencing Alliance

🤺 TCFC June Challenges, and what a day for SYFA!

This was likely our last local tune-up before we head to Portland for Summer Nationals, and our fencers showed up with the kind of growth and grit we love to see.

Some big results to celebrate:

🥇 Aviella Wilkins, 1st of 9, Y-12 Mixed Foil
🥈 Ardella Walsh, 2nd of 3, Y-12 Women’s Foil, plus 3rd of 9 in Y-12 Mixed Foil
🥉 Graham Randall, 3rd of 9, Y-12 Mixed Foil
🏅 Maja Elizabeth Kunze, 3rd of 3, Senior Women’s Foil
🔥 Therese-Margaret Woerter, 7th of 16, Senior Mixed Foil
🔥 Linus Winters, 8th of 16, Senior Mixed Foil

And the rest of our Senior Mixed Foil squad battled hard and kept fencing strong:
Evan Sundsbak (9th), Ashwin Koka (12th), Ezra Mogensen (13th), Maja Elizabeth Kunze (15th), Avarie Phingpha (16th)

A special shoutout to our épéeist Ashwin Koka, who doubled up and competed in two events, adding a 14th of 23 in Senior Mixed Épée to go with his 12th in foil. 💪

Win or learn, every bout makes us better. Proud of this whole team. Portland, here we come. ⚔️



Coach and fam also were lucky enough to see Horace the Co**se Flower Como Park Zoo & Conservatory open!!

To everyone who was part of that video,

I have started this note more times than I can count, because the truth is I don't have words big enough for what you gave me. I watched the whole thing, and then I watched it again, and somewhere in there I just sat and cried. Twenty-seven years of coaching, and I was never prepared to see all of your faces gathered in one place, telling me what our time together meant to you.

Here is something you may not know about coaching: it is, by its nature, a quiet and often thankless calling. You pour everything you have into people, and then you send them off into their lives. I am always looking to see where the people in my life landed, and it is an honor to know that somewhere out there, a piece of what I was trying to inspire or teach brought a little joy or success their way. But most of the time you never find out where the seed fell. You hope. You wonder. You move on to the next group of kids and you do it all over again, trusting that somewhere down the road it mattered. To suddenly be handed proof, your proof, all of your voices and memories stitched together, is something I will never be able to fully describe. You gave a coach the rarest gift there is: you let me see the road behind me.

I want to be honest with you about why I do this, because I think it explains why your video hit me the way it did. I have never coached for the thanks. I have never even really coached for the wins. I know that sounds like the kind of thing coaches are supposed to say, but I mean it down to my bones. Trophies tarnish and scores get forgotten. Coaching is simply where I go to pour my effort and my experience into people's futures. That is the whole thing for me. The only thing that ever truly mattered was whether I was helping to build better people. Stronger, kinder, more determined human beings who would go out and do good in the world. That was always the real game. And your video told me that maybe, in some small way, it worked.

I have always believed that good coaches don't know everything. The moment you think you do is the moment you stop being any good. A real coach has to keep learning. They have to work as hard as the people they are trying to inspire toward something great. You cannot ask someone to give you everything they have if you are not willing to do that same work yourself. I have tried to live by that for 27 years, and your video has only made me want to hold myself to it more.

Whether I knew you through fencing, on a basketball court, on a football field, or simply as family and friends who became part of this life Heidi and I have built together, please understand this: you were never just an athlete to me, and you were never a means to a result. You were the result. You are the reason. Watching you become who you are now is the only prize I ever wanted.

And I want each of you to know that I see you. Not as a blur of faces from a long career, but as individuals. I will remember each and every one of you. I carry you with me. The young person you were when we first met still lives somewhere in my memory, and now you have given me the gift of seeing who that person grew into. I will hold onto this video, and onto each of your words, for the rest of my life.

You have given me more than you know. You have reminded me exactly why I started and exactly why I cannot stop. I am going to take everything you gave me and pour it right back out into the next person who walks through my door looking for someone to believe in them. I am going to keep learning, keep working, and keep getting better, because that is what you all deserve from me, and it is what the next ones will deserve too.

So thank you for letting me be a part of your lives. And thank you, more than anything, for coming back to tell me it mattered. Do you understand how rare that is? People are given so much in this life and so seldom turn around to say what it meant to them. The teacher rarely hears it. The parent rarely hears it. The coach almost never does. You did not have to do this. There was nothing in it for you. You simply decided that I should know, and you went to the trouble of making sure I did. That choice, that act of looking back and reaching out, is its own kind of greatness, and it tells me everything about the people you have become. If I taught you nothing else, I hope I had some small hand in that.

You have given me the honor of my life. You have given me a reason to keep building the next 27 years.

With more gratitude than I know how to express,

Kamau

Coach Wilkins, Thank You! #SYFA #fencing #coaching #rochestermn #usafencing To everyone who was part of that video,I have started this note mo...

Another fun game night at SYFA!! Memorial Day edition. Kids were hungry!! We ran out of snacks and hour in. Everyone was playing DND.

A.I. can’t coach…