In the spirit of transparency, attached below is a lightly-edited version of my fourth-quarter report to the Society Youth Combat Marshal.
— Mathghamhain, East Kingdom Youth Earl Marshal
We are slowly recovering from the painful interruption of the plague years, but have still not gotten back to the momentum we had beforehand.
We have about two dozen active marshals and marshals-in-training, and a lot of our folks showed up and worked YC at Pennsic this summer. I am optimistic that we can keep the current crop of marshals-in-training engaged, and use their energy to help grow our program.
However, there were only three events with youth combat this quarter, and fewer than twenty over the course of the last year. Most of our events only have a handful of kids on the field, split between the three divisions, which makes it hard to hold meaningful tournaments. There are about five youth practices running in various corners of the kingdom, all attached to an established adult fighter practice, but only two of them consistently have more than two or three kids in attendance.
I have hopes that we can rebuild the level of youth engagement, so that a larger number of kids consistently show up to fight at our events, which would also help to justify offering youth combat at a larger number of events throughout the year, but this will require sustained effort to keep our program visible to the next generation of youth and their families. Support from our community in this effort would be greatly appreciated!
There’ve also been some small steps towards back-office changes: We’ve started making notes on a few minor changes to our kingdom YC rule book, and look forward to finishing those revisions and making any other changes needed to reflect whatever updates are included in the new Society youth armored rules when that handbook is next released. We’ve also started a conversation with the Ministry of the Lists about refreshing our procedures for handling youth authorization cards.
My sincere thanks to everyone who has supported youth combat over the last year, but especially to Karrah the Mischievous and Eikaterine tin Elliniki, who are the indefatigable engines that keep our program running.
