Hi everyone,

I’ve recently taken on a new project with the help of my good friend and former Princeton roommate, Ed Kelley and his programming brilliance. This year we are going to make Fantasy Fencing a reality for the collegiate championships. You will be able to build a team from the list of competitors, then watch and cheer for your fencers when they compete in the live event March 20^th-23^rd, 2014.

Using an automated draft process, you will assemble a full 12 person team of your favorite fencers from the participants list to compete against other users to win the fantasy team title.

Here’s how it’s going to work:

Step 1: Go to fantasyfencing.net and sign in with your Facebook account. (Anyone can join)

Step 2:  Next, rank-order your favorite fencers in each of the 6 disciplines (ME, WE, MF, WF, MS, WS) by clicking and dragging them from one column to the other. You can rank as many or as few as you would like. (If your turn to draft comes and none of the fencers you ranked are available or you haven’t ranked any other fencers, the system will pick from the remaining pool of fencers at random).

Step 3: Submit your ranking preferences before the submission deadline. Once the submissions are closed, we will randomly assign a draft order and run a separate automated draft process for each discipline.

The person with the first pick will receive their top choice in that discipline as their first fencer. A second random draw will determine the draft order for the players’ second fencer. Each user will end up picking 2 fencers per discipline.

Each fencer will be available for draft selection n/12 times with n = the total number of fantasy players signed up. This way, every participant will be able to draft a full fantasy team of 12 fencers.

Step 4: After the draft process is complete (March 18^th), you will receive an email notification that your team has been created. If you sign in at fantasyfencing.net, you can see your complete team and how your overall score ranks overall. You can view other players’ teams by clicking on them.

The results will be updated as the tournament progresses (at the very least after each day of the competition).

Step 5: Watch and cheer on your team! Scoring will work the same way as it does for the real life teams. 1 victory is worth 1 point. The team with the most points at the end of the competition wins!

We encourage you to discuss your personal rankings, your predictions, etc. on the new Facebook page for Fantasy Fencing and amongst yourselves. You can also tweet your thoughts to @FantasyFencing.

Step 6: Feedback! We want to hear what you thought. What did you like? What do you wish was different? What ideas do you have to improve Fantasy Fencing?

In our minds, this is only the beginning for Fantasy Fencing. We plan to take what we learn from this event to improve the fantasy game for next time. We plan to reevaluate the rules and add more capabilities to the site each year.

Like the Facebook page and follow the Twitter handle for future Fantasy Fencing updates and more!