Fencing at the first practice we held in our new location.

If you’ve been following our Facebook, you’ll know that for the past couple of months we’ve been working on building out a new permanent location for Houston Sword Sports. It’s not fully done yet, but it’s done enough – we started holding classes there on Saturday! Today, Monday, April 17, most of our class schedule will move to the new location for good.

Here’s the schedule at the new place:

We will still have Tuesday classes at the Bellaire Rec Center! Youth Fencing, Tuesdays from 6-7, will stay the same as it has been. We will also have a class for adult and teen beginners from 7:30-9, taking the place of the old class. If you are an experienced fencer over 18 who likes to fence on Tuesdays, come to the Zone. If you are new to fencing and over 13, come to the Bellaire Rec on Tuesdays. Confused? Just email Liz@HoustonSwords.com and she’ll set you up.

Why we’re excited

We get to set our own schedule. For the rest of the spring we’ll keep basically the same schedule, because we know you have set aside specific times for you or your kid to fence. But when we are ready to set our own schedule, we don’t have to work around room availability at all.

We have a lot more space. We don’t have all the scoring machines set up yet but we do have eight strips, as opposed to the maximum of four before. The strip lines are painted on the floor, so now we can enforce rules about staying on strip! We’ll have room to do private lessons during classes. Folks also have room for their bags.

We have a permanent place to store gear that isn’t Coach Liz’s garage. In between classes, we can hang up the gear to let it air out. In the bad old days (last week) everything went into a bag for at least an hour or two before we hung it up. You’ll smell the difference.

Most – not all – of the equipment. Swords not shown.

What’s still to come

A nice entryway. Our raised plywood floor presents some challenges, so we’re going to make sure that the entryway looks nice and allows people with bags and in wheelchairs easy access. We saved the entryway for last so we’d have somewhere to play with saws and polyurethane without having to protect any floor we planned to keep.

Overhead reels, more scoring machines, repeater lights. We’ll be able to run eight strips all at once. It’ll be a little snug but better than waiting on the sidelines for a strip to open up!

More furniture. We are still assembling everything we need, especially for the office, coaches’ lounge, and armory. We also need benches and other seating, shelves for gear storage, and a counter for the reception area.

More branding. Ordered big stickers with our logo today! We need a directional sign for the street and some signs for inside The Zone, too.

Building this club has been a labor of love. It’s a lot of work, but now the payoff is here. Come see us! Register on our Classes page today!