HEMA Ratings adds 28 fighters as James Eldredge debuts at 402nd

The June Mixed & Men’s Steel Single Rapier update put hard numbers on what HEMA’s sharp end has become: bigger, deeper and far more international than a few local scenes driving the whole category. HEMA Ratings added 28 new fighters, logged three comebacks after at least two years away, and pushed James Eldredge into the table at 402nd with a 1,386.3 rating.

That entry is only part of the story. The category now sits at 1,874 fighters on the main island, with another 96 spread across five islands and 38 fighters who have stayed on an island for as long as they have been active in the category. That kind of depth matters because single rapier is not handing out easy climbs anymore. Every jump has to survive a broader, more varied field, and the rankings are starting to look like a true international ledger instead of a local ladder.

The clearest mover in June was Ned Brabner, whose rating rose from 868.5 to 1,273.6. Bradley Cramer made the biggest leap in rank, climbing from 20th to 9th with a weighted rating of 1,844, a move that puts him squarely in the race at the top end. Travis McKenzie delivered the biggest upset, doing it with an estimated 14.48% win chance, the kind of result that tells you this table is volatile enough to punish complacency and reward anyone who can turn one hard result into momentum.

The spread of names near the top says as much about the category as the numbers do. Clubs such as Black Tigers, Accademia Romana d’Armi, Melbourne Fencing Society, Scholar Victoria, HEMA Riga, Wichita Fencing & HEMA Academy and University of West Florida Fencing show how the field now stretches across the United States, Australia, Italy and Latvia. That cross-border mix is why rapier comparisons are getting more meaningful: a strong result in one circuit has to hold up against athletes arriving from very different training cultures and tournament pools.

HEMA Ratings says the system runs on Glicko-2, the algorithm created by Harvard statistics professor Mark Glickman, and that the weighted rating is the number that matters most because it reflects both score and deviation. The confidence thermometer tracks that deviation, so lower deviation means higher confidence. The site says the numbers are used for tournament seeding, individual progress tracking and fun, pulling results from tournament software, volunteers, old paper records and video records. Fighters can also request anonymization, which keeps the database broad without forcing every athlete into public view. That combination of scale, turnover and international reach is exactly why this June table feels bigger than a monthly update.