By Forrest MacDougall, Head Coach and Owner, Precision Athletics Fencing Club

Every fencer in my club has a smartphone. Every parent does. Every coach does. And sitting inside almost every one of those phones is the most powerful training assistant ever built, available for free or close to it, and almost no one in fencing is actually using it well.

I want to fix that in the next ten minutes.

This isn’t a tech article. You won’t need to buy a gadget, install special software, or learn to code. If you can send a text message, you can do everything in this post. My goal is to give athletes, parents, and coaches a plain-English starting point for using AI as a thinking partner in fencing, with hypothetical examples you can adapt to your own situation today.

Why I’m writing this

I’ve coached foil for over twenty years and I run Precision Athletics Fencing Club in Southern California. Off the strip, I spend a lot of my time building with AI. I’ve worked hands-on with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Qwen, Gemma, and MiniMax, both as cloud services and as models running locally on my own hardware. I’ve also dabbled with agentic tools like OpenClaw, which let AI models actually do things instead of just chat. So I’m not guessing about what these tools can and can’t do.

Here’s the most important thing I can tell you up front: the specific tool doesn’t matter very much. The big modern AI chatbots are all good enough for what I’m about to describe. If you have access to one, you have what you need. Pick one, get comfortable with it, and move on.

Three honest ground rules before we start

I’m going to be direct here, because the AI conversation in sports is full of hype and short on common sense.

Rule one. AI is a thinking partner, not a coach replacement. It can’t see your blade, watch your distance, or feel the rhythm of a bout. What it can do is help you organize your thoughts, ask better questions, and prepare more carefully. That’s a real edge. Just not the same edge a lesson is.

Rule two. Garbage in, garbage out. What you get back depends almost entirely on what you put in. Vague questions get vague answers. Specific questions, with real context, get answers you can use.

Rule three. Privacy matters. Don’t upload anything to an AI service that you wouldn’t be comfortable posting publicly. That includes minors’ full names, medical information, or anything you wouldn’t want shared. When in doubt, anonymize.

Alright. Here are the five places I think AI delivers real value for our community, ordered from easiest-to-start to most advanced.

1. Helping parents understand the sport

Who this is for: Parents, especially new ones.

Fencing is one of the most confusing sports on the planet to watch as a beginner. The right of way rules in foil and sabre look like a language nobody told you about. The referee’s hand signals look like air traffic control. Half the parents I meet in their first season are smiling and clapping politely without really knowing what just happened on the strip. I love them for it, but I can tell.

An AI chatbot solves this faster than any book or YouTube rabbit hole I have ever seen. You can ask it anything, get a clear answer in under a minute, and then ask three follow-up questions until it actually makes sense.

A hypothetical example. A parent watches their kid lose 5 to 4 and has no clue why the last touch went the other way. They open their phone and type something like:

“I’m the parent of a 12-year-old foil fencer. Please explain right of way in foil in plain English, as if I have never watched the sport before. Then explain why a simultaneous attack might be awarded to one fencer instead of the other.”

 

Two minutes later they get it. Next bout, they’re watching with informed eyes instead of guessing.

What to watch out for: AI can be confidently wrong about specific USA Fencing rules, especially recent rule changes. Use it for concepts and general understanding, but always verify specific rule questions with a real referee or coach.

2. Progress journaling and the mental game

Who this is for: Athletes, especially teens.

This is the one I would push hardest on every competitive fencer in the country, because the cost is zero and the upside is enormous.

After every practice, every lesson, every tournament, a fencer has thoughts. Most of those thoughts evaporate within an hour. The fencers who get better fastest are usually the ones who reflect honestly on what just happened. Problem is, journaling is boring and most kids won’t do it on their own. I get it. I wouldn’t have done it as a teenager either.

AI fixes the boring part. Instead of staring at a blank page, the athlete just talks. They type or voice-dictate what happened, what worked, what felt off, and then they ask the AI to help them think about it.

A hypothetical example. A high school fencer comes home from a Saturday RYC, frustrated, and types:

“I’m a competitive foil fencer. I just finished a tournament and went 3 and 3 in pools and lost in the table of 32. My footwork felt slow in the first two bouts but I figured something out in bout three. In the DE I lost to a left-hander and I never figured out his distance. Ask me five short questions to help me reflect on what I learned today, then summarize my main takeaways.”

 

That’s a real conversation that turns a frustrating day into a learning day. Over a season, those reflections compound. Print them out, bring them to your coach, and now your lessons start from somewhere instead of starting from scratch.

What to watch out for: AI is almost always encouraging. Sometimes too encouraging. It’s great for reflection, but it’s not great at telling a fencer hard truths. That’s still your coach’s job.

3. Tournament prep and opponent scouting

Who this is for: All three. Athletes plan, parents support, coaches strategize.

A few days before a tournament, most competitive fencers know the venue, the time, and not much else. There’s a lot of useful planning that just doesn’t happen, because nobody has time to sit down and organize it.

This is where AI becomes a planning assistant. You hand it the basic facts, your goals, your habits, and your weaknesses, and have it generate a personalized prep checklist. Not a generic one off the internet, but one shaped around the specific fencer.

A hypothetical example. A Y14 fencer has a regional tournament on Saturday. The athlete or parent types:

“I’m a 13-year-old foil fencer rated D24. I have a regional tournament Saturday morning, with check-in at 8 AM. I get nervous in pools and tend to start slow. I also have a habit of attacking too early when I’m behind. Build me a 3-day prep plan covering nutrition, sleep, equipment check, warmup, and one specific mental cue I can use when I notice myself rushing.”

 

The output is a real, specific plan. It won’t be perfect, but it will be miles better than no plan at all, and reading it out loud the night before forces the fencer to actually think about the tournament.

For scouting, you can also describe an opponent in plain language and ask for tactical ideas. “I’m facing a tall left-handed counter-attacker who likes to bait the parry and disengage.” The AI will give you a starting framework to discuss with your coach.

What to watch out for: AI doesn’t know your specific opponents, your specific division, or the politics of your local circuit. Treat its tactical advice as a brainstorm, not a battle plan.

4. Training plans and periodization

Who this is for: Coaches, and athletes old enough to manage their own week.

This one is more advanced, but it might be the highest-leverage use of all. Building a thoughtful training plan that periodizes across a season is a skill that takes years to develop. AI won’t replace that skill, but it can dramatically speed up the planning process for any coach willing to use it well.

The trick is to give the AI real context. Athlete’s age, level, goals, current weekly schedule, injury history, upcoming tournaments, time available to train. Then ask for a draft, not a finished plan.

A hypothetical example. A coach prepping a small group of older youth fencers types:

“I coach a group of four 12-to-14-year-old foil fencers training 4 days a week, 2 hours per session. Their next national event is 10 weeks away. They are technically solid but lose focus late in bouts. Draft a 10-week training block that builds conditioning early, sharpens tactics in the middle, and tapers competition intensity in the final two weeks. Suggest a framework for a drill I can edit and adapt for each phase.”

 

The result is a somewhat serviceable first draft. The coach edits it, throws out what doesn’t fit, and ends up with a plan in 20 minutes that would have taken two hours of staring at a notebook.

Pro tip: the short prompt gets you a generic answer because you gave it generic information. To get a coach-level plan, give coach-level context. Define what “technically solid” actually means for your group. Describe what “losing focus” looks like in concrete terms. Add real constraints like injury history or session-length limits. Then, the biggest unlock of all, tell the AI to ask you clarifying questions before drafting the plan. That one instruction turns the AI from a vending machine into a planning partner.

 

For self-directed athletes, same logic. Describe your week, your goals, and your constraints, and ask for a structured plan you can show to your coach for feedback.

What to watch out for: AI loves to be ambitious. It will happily prescribe a training load that nobody could actually do. Always pressure-test the plan against the real life of the athlete, especially school, sleep, and other sports.

5. Bout video review

Who this is for: All three, in different ways.

This is the most powerful use, and the one with the most caveats. Save it for once you’re comfortable with the others.

A note before we dig in: for video upload, not all AI tools are equal. As of 2026, Gemini (Google) is the most capable consumer chatbot at accepting raw video files and analyzing them directly. The free tier handles short clips, which is enough to try this with one of your kid’s tournament videos this weekend. The paid Gemini plan unlocks longer videos and higher daily limits. ChatGPT and Claude have added video capability recently, but Gemini is still the cleanest tool for this specific job today.

One important privacy footnote before you upload anything. On Gemini’s free tier, Google may use your uploads to help improve their products. The paid tier doesn’t. Either way: keep clips short, anonymize what you can, and never upload video of other people’s kids without permission. If privacy matters to you, the paid tier is worth it.

The newest generation of AI tools can accept video clips and image uploads. That means you can take a short clip of a touch, upload it, describe what you were trying to do, and ask the AI to help you analyze what actually happened. It won’t catch everything a trained coach’s eye catches, and it will sometimes get the specifics wrong. But for a fencer learning how to watch themselves, it’s a remarkable starting point.

A hypothetical example. An athlete uploads a 15-second clip of a touch they lost. They type:

“I’m the fencer on the right in this clip. I was trying to set up a feint-disengage attack but I got counter-attacked into preparation. Walk me through what you see in the clip, frame by frame. Where did my distance break down? What was I telegraphing? Ask me what I felt during each phase so we can compare what I saw with what actually happened.”

 

The conversation that follows builds the skill of self-coaching, which is a skill every elite athlete eventually needs.

What to watch out for: AI can’t replace a trained coaching eye. It will miss subtleties. It can also misread what’s happening, especially with foil right of way. Use it as a reflection tool, not a referee.

Pro tip: run an AI model directly on your phone, completely offline

This is the bonus round. If you read everything above and thought “I love this, but I don’t want my kid’s reflections or bout video going to anyone’s cloud,” there’s now a real answer.

Google released a free app called Google AI Edge Gallery, available on both iPhone and Android. It lets you download and run a Gemma model directly on your phone, with no internet connection required and no data ever leaving the device. Once the model is downloaded, the AI runs entirely on your phone’s chip. Free, private, forever.

This is the same Gemma model family I run locally on my own machine, just shrunk down to fit a flagship phone. The version most readers will want is Gemma 4 E4B, which is the sweet spot for modern phones with 8GB or more of RAM. If you have a recent iPhone Pro, a Samsung Galaxy S-series, a Pixel, or any flagship Android from the last three years, it’ll run.

What can it actually do? Conversation, journaling, reflection, planning, summarizing notes from a lesson, drafting messages to your coach. The mental-game and progress-journaling use case from section 2 fits perfectly here. It won’t be as smart as the cloud models from Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic, and it can’t handle video. But it runs without internet, costs nothing after install, and your child’s words never leave their phone.

For families nervous about privacy, or athletes who want to journal in a tournament hotel with terrible Wi-Fi, this is the answer. Search “Google AI Edge Gallery” on the App Store or Play Store, install it, download Gemma 4 E4B from inside the app, and you’re running your own private AI in under ten minutes.

The takeaway

AI isn’t going to make anyone a champion. The lesson, the footwork, the bouting, the losing, the long drive home from a tournament where it all fell apart, that’s the actual work. None of it is replaceable.

But AI removes friction. It turns a confused parent into an informed one. A frustrated athlete into a reflective one. A busy coach into a more prepared one. It costs almost nothing and it’s sitting in your pocket right now.

The fencers who pull ahead in the next five years won’t be the ones with the fanciest gear, the most expensive coaches, or the longest hours on the strip. They’ll be the ones who learn to think out loud with a tool that’s free, fast, and always available.

Pick a chatbot. Try one of the examples above this week. Steal the prompts, change the details to fit your fencer, and see what comes back. That’s the whole barrier to entry. There’s no excuse left.

If you want to talk about how we use these tools at Precision Athletics, or you’re a parent or coach with a question I didn’t cover, come say hello at the club.

Coach Forrest MacDougall
Head Coach and Owner, Precision Athletics Fencing Club
southbayfencing.com