Crossing Fight School pivots to sabre or messer in June 7 class

Mike “The Colonel” Sanders used Crossing Fight School’s June 7 session to launch the club’s first run of one-handed weapons work, with the lesson landing on sabre or messer after a Discord vote. For a school rooted in German longsword, the shift was more than variety: it showed a curriculum that is building outward from Liechtenauer tradition without losing its structure.

Crossing Fight School, a branch of the Medieval European Martial Arts Guild, runs out of Pivotal Training at 133 Eayrestown Rd in Southampton Township, New Jersey. Classes are held on Sundays at 3 p.m., with the first two hours devoted to warm-ups and the lesson and the last hour reserved for optional sparring. The school lists tuition at $20 per class or $50 per month, and the first lesson is free, with newcomers able to sit in or participate alongside an experienced practitioner or instructor.

That matters because one-handed weapons change the job description for the fencer. Longsword work rewards two-handed leverage, stronger binding, and a broader range of tactical pressure; sabre or messer asks students to think harder about measure, tempo, blade economy, and what the off hand is doing when it is no longer sharing the grip. The weapon is lighter in the hand, but the decisions are not simpler. Cuts have to arrive cleaner, defensive choices have to be sharper, and recoveries have to be managed with less mechanical help from the second hand.

The sequence also fits the school’s pattern of treatise-based progression. The previous week’s work ran through Hans Medel von Salzburg, the 15th-century German fencing master associated with the Liechtenauer tradition, and the surviving Hans Medel Fechtbuch was compiled by Paulus Hector Mair after 1566 and is now held in Augsburg, Germany, at the Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg. That sort of source-driven pacing makes the move into one-handed systems feel deliberate rather than improvised.

Crossing Fight School has already signaled that sabre and messer are not side projects. The club previously described a sabre lesson as much anticipated, with Connie Frazier leading one of those classes, and it also announced a Messer and Sword & Buckler intramural tournament. For a group founded in 2006 and committed to an inclusive, accommodating environment, the June 7 class showed a program that is widening its technical range while keeping the same historical through-line.