Our guest is Brandon Rochelle, Tournament Committee chair, to talk about the process of running a tournament, how he got into this role, and what people might be interested to know about the behind-the-scenes magic behind USA Fencing tournaments.
Our guest is Brandon Rochelle, Tournament Committee chair, to talk about the process of running a tournament, how he got into this role, and what people might be interested to know about the behind-the-scenes magic behind USA Fencing tournaments.
Recorded LIVE at the 2024 Junior Olympics.
[INTRO]
[00:00:01] BW: Hello, and welcome to First to 15, the official podcast of USA Fencing. I'm your host, Bryan Wendell. In this show, you're going to hear from some of the most inspiring, interesting, and insanely talented people in the sport we all love. First to 15 is for anyone in the fencing community and even for those just checking out fencing to see what it's all about. So whether you're an Olympian or a Paralympian, a newcomer, a seasoned veteran, a fencing parent, a fan, or anyone else in this wonderful community, this podcast is for you. With that, let's get to today's episode. Enjoy.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:40] BW: All right, we're here live at the Junior Olympics. If you hear any screaming, don't be alarmed. That's what it is, with Brandon Rochelle, who's the tournament committee chair. That has a lot of different responsibilities. It's kind of a simple name, but it comes with a lot of different responsibilities. We're going to talk about the process of running a tournament, how you got into this role, and then what people might be interested to know about the behind-the-scenes of a tournament. Welcome, Brandon.
[00:01:04] BR: Thank you very much. Happy to be here.
[00:01:06] BW: Since it's fresh on your mind here at Junior Olympics, let's just talk about your on-the-ground responsibilities at a tournament, which is different from the tournament committee chair responsibilities, right? What are you doing here at this tournament? What have you been up to?
[00:01:21] BR: That's a great question. I think the tournament committee at the very high level is really responsible for the organizational side of the rule book and just the general organizing of tournaments themselves at the national level in particular. They're kind of responsible for appointing the bout committee of each of the national events. There's a subcommittee of the tournament committee that determines kind of how we staff the bout committee to see the people that you see up on the stage taking your bout slips when you want bouts, passing out the pool sheets, and also operating the general scheduling of tournaments.
Here for JOs in particular, a good example would be last March of 20 – I guess ‘23 at this point. We were looking at the schedule for what would look like for this entire season, trying to decide what goes on what day. That's kind of an action of the members of the tournament committee. As the registrations start to come in, we see, okay, now what time can you check in to your events. Is that going to be an 8am event? Is that going to be a 2pm event? A lot of that depends on strip utilization, how different strips are being used throughout the day, how many people we can fit into a day even and get out of here at a reasonable time. Members of the tournament committee are also responsible for that.
Getting down to the actual bout committee here at JOs, we have our about committee chairs who are responsible for what event goes to what specific strip, making sure that you don't show up and there's three other events all fencing on that same strip, kind of keeping everything segmented and running properly. Then they are also kind of the managers of all of the people running the individual events, too, which are appointed from our national tournament, our national bout committee staff.
[00:02:52] BW: Now, could that be predicted in advance? In other words, we know this event is going to be in the L pod and then shift to this. Or is there a lot of audibles happening, and it's not really set in stone?
[00:03:03] BR: Yes. It's a very different answer pre-COVID and post-COVID to that. It's actually pretty fascinating. Before COVID, we would check in the day of. You would kind of know the general area of where you were going, and we would make strip assignments off of that. I'd say before that, it was a little bit less planned. But during the COVID period, we decided to start posting pool and strip assignments for the morning events and what ended up being the whole day as we got further into that process, where you can now see where the whole day you're going to be the [inaudible 00:03:30] events all the way to the very late afternoon events. We know kind of exactly where they're going to be now.
That took a lot more planning. It takes a lot more thought into what events are going onto what strips. But at the same time, it's a lot more predictable. The morning of, you're not running around, like trying to find your strip, kind of exactly where you can warm up, where your event is generally going to be. I think a lot of people like it in that it's a little bit more predictable. At the same time, it does come with some consequences if people don't show up. I think that's why it's super critical to notify if you're not going to be able to make it to the withdrawals emails because we do look very closely at that as we are planning for the pools for the next day and making it fair to everybody.
From a planning perspective, we have to work out at 5pm the night before. Our bout committee chairs have to go through basically every moment of the day for that following day, looking at that strip, using some of our projection algorithms on how long a pool takes, how long DEs take based upon the various event sizes to come up with what is going to be a full-day strip plan when that – prior to 2020, 2021, it was not something that we ever even considered.
[00:04:35] BW: The goal is each strip is in use at all times, essentially, right, during those heavy moments?
[00:04:40] BR: Yes. We have some planning spreadsheets that have been used for probably going on 30 years now. They're the most complicated Excel formulas, I think, I've ever seen on some of this stuff. But being able to build off of those and knowing general timing. We look at that pretty much every year. We'll go back and look at tournaments and kind of see how long is it taking for an epee pool to take or a foil pool, sabre pool. How long does a general direct elimination bout take? We start to model our days off of that using some of these planning spreadsheets to help us.
Some people are really surprised to hear that a pool of foil or epee can take upwards to two hours and 15 minutes, sometimes two and a half hours at the national level. Here in Charlotte, we have a massive facility. Even walking from one side of the venue to the other takes 5 or 10 minutes sometimes. All of that kinds of adds up where at the local level, you may be able to get off a pool of seven in an hour and 30 minutes. But by the time you think of the logistics of a national tournament, it does lengthen out to that.
Once you think about a two-hour, two-hour-and-a-half pool round for foil or epee, then we go through a round review period where you're looking at your scores and making sure you're correct and then getting you actually physically to your strips to fence DEs. There's even 10, 15 minutes just to move a mass of people from one place to the next. There is quite a bit of logistics that goes into thinking about not only the actual fencing but how people get to those strips, too, that can really impact timing.
[00:05:58] BW: Knowing that there's just so much foresight that goes into this and so much careful planning, it brings me to a question that I hear a lot from families which is, well, why can't we know start times months and months in advance, right? That's probably the most frequent question that our friends on the USA Fencing event staff get. You say that back in March of last year which events are going to be on which day. Why can't we know the times for those events?
[00:06:25] BR: It is a very good question and something that I am trying to push as hard as possible to get us to the point where we can publish those earlier than we currently are.
[00:06:34] BW: Which is about six weeks, right? That’s the goal.
[00:06:36] BR: Yes. It’s about six weeks. I will say, over the course of time, we've tried to give a little bit more room to that. I do understand, obviously, travel logistics is a huge portion of getting to national events. It's very much on my mind when we're thinking about how we're scheduling our events. You'll notice even on the last day, we kind of do our strip planning a little bit differently on the last days to try to get people out as early as possible. Sometimes, that can involve flighting even foil or epee events. We really look at in particular like how do we get the most people out of the room the fastest every day is fundamentally how we're looking at our scheduling.
I would say to get to the point of where can we know this the March before the previous year, I think it's something that we can certainly work toward. One of the interesting things that came also out of the COVID era was the shift in the demographics of the different types of events. The way that Y10, Y12, Y14, working our way up the chain through cadet to junior. The way that the growth of the tournaments happened over those different age groups was all very different. We saw some spikes in Y14 or in cadet. You even see that in the general demographics of the membership as well. Our cadet age category is probably one of the most rapidly growing. So it's a little bit difficult to predict exactly how big some of those events are going to be, as those demographics were shifting so quickly.
I think we're getting to a better sense of understanding those growth patterns now so that we can get back to the point and say, okay, we can project 15% growth or whatever it may be in women's foil and cadet age category, and start to plan a little bit more accurately. But when you think about a limited number of strips, we have X number of strips available at every national tournament. If you go from – if, let's say, there's 65 strips in the building. 66 strips if you needed that at 8am in the morning is not feasible. You can only move as fast as your slowest pool in our current competition format.
If we don't have the strips available to run all of the pools at the same time or in a traditional double flight like you see a lot in sabre, if we run even one strip extra on that, then you have to wait another two hours, like we were talking about in foil because now then you have to – once that strip is free from that first pool round, you have to go put another pool on it, and it's going to take another two hours. We know that we can balance a certain number of people in an overall day. But to know can we fit that at eight o'clock or can we fit that at two o'clock has been a little bit more difficult to predict than I really ever imagined coming out of the post-COVID era.
I think it's something that we're always looking at. We're getting a little bit better about understanding those shifting patterns. Particularly how they grow from year to year is the more important part of it because even seven more people is another strip. Then now, we need 66, not 65.
[00:09:11] BW: These convention centers are only so big, too, right?
[00:09:13] BR: Yes. That's a huge part of it, too.
[00:09:15] BW: How is the tournament committee thinking about event size? At this event, we had in junior men’s epee exactly 400 people checked in, right, which in my two years with USA Fencing was the largest I'd seen, probably maybe seen bigger. How are you thinking about that and making sure that it's a positive competitive experience for everybody as USA Fencing membership continues to grow?
[00:09:37] BW: Yes. I mean, that's the massive question before the committee right now and something that we're in the very early phases of really thinking about overall local to national tournament pathways and how we perceive that going as the sport grows. I think a big part of it is thinking about what do we want our national tournaments to be. That's something that does takes a little bit of soul-searching, too. It involves a lot of different constituent groups from our sports performance teams, our national coaches, our club owners, fencers themselves. How do they want to approach coming to national events coming from –
I think a big part of me and my draw to the fencing community was that a lot of these national tournaments are – it's where you see your friends. It's not just a competitive experience. It's like these are some of the best friends in the world that I have as a part of the fencing community. When you come to these different events, that's where you get to see them. That's where you get to go to dinner. That's where you get to hang out and work together, one of the cool parts of the sport.
How do we think about that in the context of what event facilities can we fit into, and can we have 150 strips? Probably not. That really limits us to a very small number of facilities in the country. I think we need to answer that question on like what do we want our national tournaments to be. Then everything else kind of answers itself from there on how we get people to these events.
I've always made the claim that I think Summer Nationals in particular should be our carnival. I love the fact that there are so many different age demographics at that tournament that is kind of a come-one-come-all. You can see all the fencing vendors that are out there, see new equipment, really things that you might not get to experience, especially in some of our smaller communities. There are some tournaments that we want to protect than others on the way that event sizes are growing.
I don't really perceive any drastic changes. I think our national tournaments are probably about the right size right now. We're finding a groove on facilities that can accommodate us at a larger number of strips. When I first started, having 48 strips was this magical, mystical creature of a massive tournament and now routinely having 65 strips in even some of our smaller NACs. The March NAC in particular has over 4,000 registrations to it, which for just a youth tournament with cadet on it, those are crazy numbers for that even being a West Coast tournament, too. Some of that is just about thinking about what we want our tournaments to be, and then there are questions that are answered because of that.
I think national tournaments, we want them to be a show. We want people to have a good time when they're getting here, too. So you have to protect that on we don't want to be here till midnight on one hand. But at the other time, we want to make the sport as accessible as possible.
[00:12:07] BW: You talked about the number of strips being one of the changes that you've noticed. What are some other changes you've noticed on the tournament operations, let's call it, side?
[00:12:15] BR: Yes. I think the role of technology has a big role in this, too. You'll notice our satellite bout committee area if you've ever been down in our finals area, how much that has evolved over the years and kind of the presentation level that's involved with some of that. But I don't think people understand how much technology goes behind some of the stuff that we do now.
I make a really big joke with my bout committee crew that when I first started on this, we used about half a crate for all of our equipment. It was run on a laptop. Our main server was just a regular laptop with a spinning hard drive. I can remember, I was in Tucson, Arizona, running a NAC there, and the hard drive of that server failed. Our IT team overnight put a new little mini hard drive back in that computer that we had as a spare. Then I spent the entire final day of the tournament reentering every single bout slip, every single pull sheet. If you think about when there's ties in fencing, you have to do coin flips that have to be exactly the same to get the tableaus exactly how they were. I spent that entire day entering score sheet.
We have a little bit more redundancy now, thankfully, on some of that. It comes with a lot more equipment, so we have battery backup systems now to maintain our server in the event of a power outage, which actually happened here in Charlotte. We lost our main power source for about 30 minutes but still had some redundancy in there to kind of keep going along the way. Then networked into our video replay area, even our awards area, they can see your results. It's coming all together in a pretty massive setup now versus what it was maybe 15, 20 years ago when I first started with the sport.
[00:13:42] BW: Yes. I'm still shocked with just how connected everything is and how someone can look on their phone and see the score live, updating with what they're watching in front of them. If an outsider were to come in, there's one thing that they might be like, “Oh, they're still using paper. Someone's taking a piece of paper to the bout committee and turning it in.” Not knowing much myself about the process, is that something that could be digitized or enhanced by technology at some point? Or is that a necessity, the physical slip that the winning fencer takes to the bout committee?
[00:14:16] BR: I think you're in my head a little bit with some of these questions. But it'd be something that I'd love to have being completely paperless. I have run a couple regional events where it was something I wanted to try to see like is it possible to run a tournament without paper. So having scoring machines that are directly connected into fencing time is a functionality that it has. Doing it at the scale of a Grand Prix or a World Cup level where you have 30 or less strips, let's say, sometimes even less than that.
To scale it up to 64 strips and thinking about the networking requirements of that, I think long-term it is – certainly, maybe even medium-term is fully possible. But how do you guarantee the authenticity of it? How do you make sure that you don't have bad actors going in and entering bad pool results? I think some of those things people will think are insurmountable. At the same time, if your score is wrong as a fencer, I guarantee you, they're going to come tell me about it. So there are some protection mechanisms there where it's not just like it's entered, and then it's set in stone that way. There are some review paths that can be available as we introduce new technologies.
But that'd be something I'd love to have. You have to think about what kind of devices do we give the referees to be able to enter those scores. Is it them manually entering? It is it direct connection of the scoring equipment? There's a few little intricacies there on we want to make sure the referee is there primarily for safety and then looking after protecting the rules on that. Do we want to add additional burdens to their role is a question I think that needs to be answered. Beyond that, could scoring machines be directly connected? Could you get push notifications about what your next bout is, where your next bout is, what time your next bout is? I think some of that would be really cool, and we're thinking about ways longer term to be able to do that through all of the software systems that kind of have to unify together to create our tournaments.
[00:15:57] BW: That would be awesome to be able to kind of know in real-time, okay, head to strip C1 now. Because I actually hear your voice and I hear Maggie's voice sometimes saying, “Fencers report to your strips,” and that type of thing. I like the idea of regional tournaments being almost this area where you can try some of these things. It reminds me of kind of like when Major League Baseball introduced the pitch clock at the Minor League level, right, and saw how that worked. Are there other things that you're thinking about that you'd love to bring to the national tournament scene that maybe you're going to try out at a regional tournament near you at some point?
[00:16:30] BR: Yes. I mean, I think a lot of it is about spectator experience, too, for me. It's not just about the experience. We've talked certainly about some of that stuff and making it easier to know where you fence. When Grandma and Grandpa come to the first fencing tournament, I get a lot of questions about where's my grandson. You ask, “Well, is he a foil, epee, or sabre fencer?” They’re like, “Oh, I don't have any idea what that even means, what age category are they in. He's nine years old.” It’s like, “That could be two different age categories.”
Just helping people be introduced to the sport in an easy way, I think, is a huge part of what I'd like the role of technology to be and making sure that people understand what the expectations are when they come to a tournament as well. So they kind of understand, okay, now, I need to go check in. Now, the next part of that will be my pool assignment. Then after that will be a direct elimination round. Just even explaining that to some people who are nearer to the sport can be somewhat complex. So how do we reduce those complexities through technology is, I think, a huge part of it.
We used to have television screens that would show all of our live results. Then it evolved to everyone now has a mobile device. It’s getting the data a little bit closer to you where you are, so you don't have to go walk to those screens anymore. You can get on your phone. Now, how can we make it more time-relevant, I think, is the next phase of that to know, okay, your event’s coming up now. Go get prepared on your strip, even at a regional. This isn't just national events I'm talking about. Just having the automations in place where that's happening, even at regional or local tournaments, would be really cool.
[00:17:54] BW: Then you could even see a time when there's an integration with the live stream as well and what the replay folks are doing with live streaming. Now, you see the semi-final bout, and you tap, and you can watch it, too, right? I mean, the path is there. Easier said than done, obviously, right? We've talked a lot about this, but I'd love to know how you got into this role. What was your path?
[00:18:16] BR: Yes. I kind of took a really weird path. I'll start, I guess, from the beginning. In late high school, I just kind of became fascinated with the sport of fencing. I think I might have seen it. That was right around the time of the Atlanta Olympics, a little bit more televised presence from Olympic sports in general, and there was probably some focus around fencing in that. I can't remember the exact moment of this, like the seed that planted fencing was going to be the sport for me.
I fenced maybe one or two times in high school, and I went to college. I went to Johns Hopkins and Baltimore and was just kind of walking out on the freshman quad. There was a booth there for fencing. I was like, “Hey, what's up with this,” and ended up on the NCAA team. It's a division three program that they have, and I was on the sabre squad, having picked up any kind of fencing weapon, much less a sabre probably about two times before I entered into the fencing cell to be on the team.
[00:19:04] BW: The ultimate walk-on.
[00:19:05] BR: Yes, yes. I went through a ton of coaching in that time period before the first meets that happened in the NCAA calendar. The Temple Open was my first individual competition that I'd ever been to. Then I got to travel all over the Northeast and even beyond that as a part of the fencing program there. It was really a different college experience than I was ever anticipating and just really fell in love with the sport.
When I moved back to Tennessee, it was at the time a little bit of a smaller fencing community. So I moved away from sabre back to epee, where there was just some more people fencing. I ended up on the organizational side, helping with some of our division competitions. So I helped run our division qualifiers. Then there was a random NAC in Memphis that one of the people that I knew, he was on the tournament committee. He was having a child and needed to go on a paternity leave during that period and asked for me to step in on the bout committee for that role. The rest is history. From there, I really fell in love with the people and with the organization and just the general sport.
That was, I guess, probably 2007, ’06 or ’07 when that started. Since then, I’ve been running a lot of the larger regional tournaments that exist across the US and then most of the national events as well, involved in most of the planning of that, and then work on the bout committee for most of them, too.
[00:20:21] BW: When you were a student at Hopkins and you went to that Temple Open, were you thinking this tournament would be run better if X, Y, and Z? Were you already – were the gears already turning at that point or?
[00:20:32] BR: That tournament in particular is actually very well-run. But –
[00:20:34] BW: Okay. [inaudible 00:20:34].
[00:20:35] BR: One of the big things that I'm focused on right now is kind of re-energizing the local level of fencing. I think we're doing a fantastic job now at the national level, especially comparatively to 10 years ago about experience, making it more consistent, making the timing more consistent, making the planning a lot more consistent. Looking at what it was 10 years ago versus today, I think it's heads and tails, which is great for the sport. The regional level, we've started to bring some of that to the regional level as well. Organizers are getting a sense of how big some of these tournaments are and being able to capacity-plan a lot better.
[00:21:10] BW: Yes. Some regional tournaments are basically small NACs, right?
[00:21:12] BW: Yes. I run the Capitol Clash as well that had 3,200 registrations this year. That's as big as some of our NACs are. I mean, they can get really big. I think it came at the detriment of the local level, though. I think that's kind of a well-known issue, too, where I started and after I came back from college and was like, “How do I continue fencing after college?” I went to some local meets. You go to some, where you're in a pool round for four, five hours. Then you sit around for an hour before the DEs come out. By the end of it, you're just like, “I spent my entire weekend on one fencing event.”
That’s, I think, really where my gear started to turn at some of those local tournaments about like how can this be improved to make this a better experience. Then that kind of worked its way up the chain until I was working with the national events. But I'd really like to bring that back down to the local level now and having some more consistency with local meets and bringing back some importance to them as well and as a part of our development path. So you don't have to show up at a 3,000-person regional event to get a good fencing experience and a good referee and a good organizing experience. You can really find some of those gems at the local level, too, to make it more accessible to those new fencers. So they don't just come to a national event, score three touches, and then be on their way. It's not really fair to them either developmentally. How do we bring that to the local level? Then work them up through the chain of being like, “Okay. Now, a regional event would be great for you. Now, let's look at national.” That's kind of what's in my head right now.
[00:22:42] BW: Bringing the importance to local tournaments, does that mean rankings-wise and points-wise? So a local event earns you points that gets you into a regional event. Is that kind of what you're thinking?
[00:22:53] BR: It's probably in the cards. I'll be very frank about that. We're looking at the tournament committee right now is through the events review group that happened about a year ago now and the youth. There was also a side of that as well that went through a youth review group on what we were looking to make some of those developmental paths to be in youth fencing and then events, what was important to our event structure, what we wanted to focus on. All of those reports fed into the tournament committee to figure out like, okay, what do we do with this, along with a strategic plan that was announced for 2024 to 2028. How do we make all three of those things align with each other to have a sustainable tournament structure?
I think a big part of it will be making our points list easier to understand. We've got some interesting brainstorming ideas coming along with that. But some of it may be pointing local events, depending on size, depending on the capabilities of the organizer. There's definitely some work to be done in thinking about the logistics of the minutia of like how we actually do it, but it might be part of it. Is there a way that you can begin to see your performance at the local level to help judge better? Should I be competing regionally or nationally? I think that being able to help people understand from a data perspective will be a big part of that.
[00:23:59] BW: Thinking about your own path and that someone had to have a baby basically to get you to that first tournament, what is the path for someone who's listening to this and says, “I want to try being on the bout committee, try the behind-the-scenes side of a tournament.”? They don't want to give up fencing, but they also want to have that experience as well.
[00:24:22] BR: Yes. I think a big part of it is on me and my committee now to help people understand that better. I think 20 years ago, it was very much a kind of like, “Oh, you knew this person who knew this person,” kind of thing, and they got you in touch. I was a benefactor of that, as I've mentioned. I'd like to make it so that we know what's happening more at that local regional level a lot better about who's running those tournaments, how they're progressing developmentally. Giving them more resources, more documents, more best practices. Helping them even understand the mechanics of how we schedule strip utilization.
The Leadership Academy has a focus area in national event planning, and I do a little presentation for them, where we go through the actual timings and the number of minutes that we allocate to different types of weapons and stuff that I think has been a big help to those people in understanding some of the high degrees of complexity they are involved versus a 10- strip tournament, versus a 65-strip tournament, and the differences that are happening in between there, so being able to work some of those resources down the chain to the local level.
Then based on the way the results are being reported back to the national office, we begin to see, “Oh, we've got a new organizer in the system.” Reaching out to them with resources, “Here are some best practices for your next event. If you have any question, here's a committee that you can go to to ask additional questions on how that's organized.” The idea then would become we begin to identify some of those local organizers, bring them up to the regional level, help them get resources to train at regional levels. Then after they're doing a good job there, let's bring you on to the national bout committee.
Right now, the way that we're doing it, let's talk about today versus kind of the future. Today, if someone expresses interest to one of the members of the tournament committee, we have a form system developed where people submit their names, what tournaments they've worked on. Then every year, we kind of go through that listing and see, okay, who has the most regional tournament experience or large local tournament experience that we might be able to bring up into the trainee pathways at the national level. I think that's getting more well-defined. How you get from a local organizer running a local club event to a regional event, that's a little bit bigger gap right now that we are looking to close.
[00:26:27] BW: Yes, something seemingly so simple. Scan your card. It says that you're here. I know it took a lot of work to get there and to make it all tie in together so that fencing time now shows that that fencer is checked in instantly. Then you and your team can say, “Okay, these people are here. These people aren't. So take them out of the pools and rearrange the pool.” It's mind-blowing all that goes on.
[00:26:46] BR: When I first started working NACs, we were on a paper-based system completely at that point. Whoever was running an event, we call them event managers in the bout committee world, the event manager would have to show up about 6:15, 6:30. They would sit at the registration desk with a sheet of paper, just checking off little tiny boxes next to every everybody's name. Then they would run up to the bout committee stage after registration closed and then work with our systems which were built on Access database at the time.
I can't tell you how many times someone would miss a little checkbox here or there. Then you publish the pools, and then someone's – and then you would run out into the field with these massive sheets of paper that you would post on bulletin boards. People would crowd all around. Then 10 minutes later, someone comes up and be like, “I'm not in the pool.” You go back and you look at the check-in sheet. You’re like, “Oh, man. I missed one of the checkboxes there.”
It’s a totally different world now. The lines used to go out the front door of the building. To see people walk up and just scan a card and hear that ding now, it's like music to my ears. Every time at a regional tournament or national tournament, I was like, “Oh, my gosh. It’s beautiful.” The work that goes into getting it to that point, though, there's quite a bit going on behind-the-scenes, for sure.
[00:27:52] BW: Of course. Then kind of last question here. This isn't even your full-time job. Why do you still do it? Why do you love coming to these tournaments and doing this important but seeming stressful role?
[00:28:05] BR: I thought a lot about that. Sometimes, you do some soul-searching when you're on the tarmac of the airport, waiting for two and a half hours. You're coming back from a tournament. But I think a huge part of it is about the community. Something I really want to make sure is protected as we go on with our thoughts about our local to national tournament pathways is making sure that the community component of our sport is certainly maintained. That's a big part of it. Having friends who have common interest is a big part, I think, just of the human experience, and fencing is certainly that for me.
On the other side of it, my normal day-to-day job, the time scales of things that I work on are in the years category. I'm working on projects that last 18 months, two years, sometimes even longer. So you really don't get that instantaneous gratification, where you're really relying on a big moment that's happening once a quarter maybe. Being able to come to a tournament, see some of the process improvements that we've made, the technology improvements that we've made, to be able to watch a tournament execute in that three or four-day time period, see everyone having a really great experience as much as possible.
That's, I think, kind of what brings me back is like, “Hey, this is some of that day-to-day success that I think is important to look at in life, too.” I have a nasty habit of turning hobbies into jobs. It's kind of been the arc of my entire existence. Fencing kind of turned into that a little bit, but this isn't certainly what I do as my sole source of income or anything. But it is certainly a big part of what fulfills me personally.
[00:29:32] BW: That's awesome. Well, that's a great place to leave it. Brandon, thanks so much for taking some time out of your busy tournament schedule to chat with us. Yes, good luck the rest of the tournament.
[00:29:40] BR: I appreciate it. Thanks.
[00:29:41] BW: Thanks.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:29:43] BW: Thanks for listening to First to 15, the official podcast of USA Fencing. We'll be back with our next conversation in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, you can stay up to date on all the latest fencing news by following us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. If you liked this podcast, please help us grow and reach more people by leaving us a rating or a review. Until next time, I'm Bryan Wendell, and I hope to see you real soon out on the strip. Bye.
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