Good Melee Drills and Breaking SCA Paradigms

Last night I went to the local University to fight with a handful of relatively new fighters.  In total there were 8 of us ranging in heavy melee experience from 1 practice to 3 full years of experience (myself being the exception, having started in 1993).  We started off with a bear pit, then did a bunch of 8 man melee fights, and ended with some melee drills.

Overall I was really impressed with the melee instincts that this group had.  I mean REALLY impressed.  The least experienced fighters out there picked up on what to do pretty quickly.  The most experienced fighter and myself discussed how rare this was, and I pondered on it since yesterday, and have come to the following conclusion.

These guys had good instincts because they did NOT learn standard SCA tactics.  Instead, they've had to figure it out on their own by doing lots and lots of foam weapon fighting with no instruction, with the final result being that they learned how to fight, rather than how to be told where to stand, how to follow instructions, and how to be part of a wall that protects the veteran fighters.  


The Standard SCA Approach
I'm a huge fan of letting fighters figure out melee fighting mostly on their own.  Much like the best basketball players in the world started on the playground, I think its best for melee fighters to begin with unstructured team play.  I

I've found that the SCA takes a much different approach which is centered more around developing a basic system, and then cramming everyone through that system.  The cultural structure of the SCA reinforces this "do what I say" approach.  In education, we call these the "sage on the stage vs the guide on the side" approaches.  I find the sage on the stage more effective for singles, much like one would prefer to learn to play the piano this way.  For melee, however, I prefer the guide on the side approach.  Let them fight, see what went right and reinforce it, and see what goes wrong and offer suggestions to fix it.

I mean, I understand why the SCA often trains their fighters to work in shield walls.  In many case, they only get a few practices in before a big war and its the best that they can really hope for a bunch of inexperienced melee fighters to be able to accomplish, but I think it has become a flawed paradigm of how to fight.  I want my fighters to become bishops and rooks, not pawns.


Those Rebellious Spearmen

I thought this historical example could offer a little perspective.  My group, Anglesey, along with our sister celtic clan, The Concusare, did a lot of Markland fighting in the late 80s and early 90s.  Unlike the SCA, Markland allowed face thrusts, which greatly improved the effectiveness of spears when approaching shield walls.  While in the SCA a solid shield wall was almost impenetrable, in a Markland battle, it was only a matter of time before the shields got picked apart.  This created an environment for a completely different set of tactics.

Sometime in the mid 90s, the SCA started allowing face thrusts in their battles, and as you can imagine, we were well ahead of the game tactically speaking.  Us, along with Calontir, were among the small minority of groups that would bring their spears out in front of the battle lines to face off against the other side, and were very effective with it.

One day, not long after this shift in rules happened, a friend and I drove 45 minutes to an SCA practice that he had heard about.  I was in my mid 20s at the time, and had a horrible looking set of gear.  We brought our greatswords and our pole arms and our spears, and sat in on the practice.  At one point in the practice, I faced off against one of their commanders with a little spear duel.  After beating him a few times, he proceeded to tell me everything that I was doing wrong, and that I wouldn't be able to do those things standing behind a shield wall.  When I told him that I do them from in front of the shields he told me, once again, that I was wrong and that if I did that, the shields will just run me down and kill me.

Anyway, life moved one, a few years later I dropped out of fighting only to return after a decade off.  In my first event back I joined in on a bridge battle, and what do I hear?  The commanders on both sides yell, "Okay everyone, lets bring our spears to the front."

The point here is that if you constantly restrict your fighters to sticking to paradigms that you are used to, and to only follow commands, they are never going to learn how to fight, and your unit will always be behind the curve on melee fighting tactics.  Here I was, ahead of the curve and being very effective, and yet the commander was trying to break me of what he considered to be bad form, simply because he was not open to a new approach to fighting.


Practice Scenarios

We tried something new, which I thought went over very well.  When doing a 4 on 4, its common to match up the teams by spreading out the teams as evenly as possible.  We tried something different.  We put the 4 most experienced fighters onto one team and the 4 least experienced fighters on the other.  The result was, as you could imagine, the experienced team won rather easily.

The way this scenario works is that the team that wins gives up one fighter to the other side (the least experienced if the more experienced team wins, and the most experienced if the less experienced team wins).  So after the first battle we fought 3 on 5.  The 5 won, but barely.  In the next battle the more experienced team won, but it was a closer fight, and then the 5 won again, but more definitively than before. We went back forth like this for several rounds.

The reason why we did this was to create a completely different dynamic than what we're used to.  When teams are evenly matched, the strategies are often the same.  The better guys end up facing off, and the newer guys face off.  Or, sometimes the better guys on each team roll over the newer guys, hoping to do it faster than their opponents do.

This offered a different dynamic.  As I told two of our newer fighters recently, "I don't need you to be able to beat a good fighter.  I need two of you to be able to beat a good fighter, and I need you to know how to adjust your tactics so that you can make that happen."  Likewise, our better fighters don't need to be able to kill new fighters.  They need to be able to kill multiple new fighters.

Being on the veteran team, it really pushed us to work to figure out how to fight when outnumbered.  The newer guys, on the other hand, eventually learned to merely attempt to survive when in a one on one situation, and how to overwhelm their opponents when they had a numbers advantage.  In the battle that they won by the largest margin, they left one fighter to occupy two of us, while the other 4 attacked our 3rd fighter.


Don't "Bruce Lee" the Single Fighter

I've now seen this happen several times.  The fighters will be in a 3 on 1 situation, and they start charging at the single fighter one at a time.  It literally looks like Enter the Dragon.  One guy runs in, the single fighter side steps and kills him, then the next guy, side step and kill, and then the 3rd guy.  The phrase I started yelling out that seemed to have the best effect when we had a numbers advantage was, "Be smart!"  Be smart means, stop, think, and work together.  When you have a numbers advantage, you are totally set up to win.  Slow down and think about who needs to go where.


2 on 1s

If you get nothing else out of these blogs, remember the following two pieces of advice.  1)  Practice your spears and 2) practice your 2 on 1 drills at every practice you can.

For these I sat out and went into "basketball coach" mode.  It was really simple.  They'd do a 2 on 1 fight and I'd watch.  When they finished, I would point out one thing that someone did poorly, or I praised one person for doing something very well, and then we'd move quickly to the next group to fight.  More often than not, the mistake that they'd make is that one person from the pair would run at the single fighter, cut off his own man, and fight him by himself.

Remember, in a 2 on 1, one person needs to commit to staying to the left half of his opponent, and one needs to commit to staying to the right.

One thing I noticed is that the newer fighters like to charge at their opponents at full speed, and they aim for the center of their opponent.  This is why the single fighter is able to side step like Bruce Lee.  This also sets them up such that their momentum takes them past the fighter, and places them directly in front of their partner.

One thing that helped at practice during this drill is before every fight I would say, "Okay, who's on the left and who's on the right?"


2 on 2 on 2 Free for all Resurrection Battles 

I learned this from a Tuchux a couple of years ago and find it to be an incredible drill.  Normally we do it with 5 fighters, but this time we did it with 6.  You pair up and fight.  First person dead goes to the resurrection point.  The second person dead goes to the resurrection point and you have a brand new team of two fighters come in, immediately!  You keep doing this until people are exhausted.

This drill gives you a constant mix of different 2 on1 and 2 on 2 situations that that you have to think very quickly on.  I've found this to be, hands down, the best drill you can do to teach people how to work together and react quickly within a melee situation.


Final Thought on Spear Fighting

On a side note, I find that the spear is still a very misunderstood weapon.  I just watched a video where an SCA commander was giving a class and pointed out that there are some "spear gods" that will walk out front with their spears and their giant egos and rack up 50 kills.  When someone in the class asked, "why do we let them do that," she replied, "well, no one can stop them.  They don't listen and just do their own thing."

Shouldn't the answer have been, "because they kill 50 people when they do that?"  I mean, is the point of the battle to follow a plan that someone drew up 30 years ago?  Or is it to kill lots of people and win the battle?