Meyer Squared teases new HEMA rating system, expands event hub

Meyer Squared is trying to turn a tournament listing page into a piece of HEMA infrastructure. Its homepage now promotes a forthcoming M² Fencing Rating System alongside event discovery, club links, results tracking, and articles on rankings, bout counts, and rules design, with Serfo 2026 in Morrow, Georgia, and Sword Quench 2026 in Reynoldsburg, Ohio already featured as upcoming stops.

The pitch is built around a familiar complaint in competitive HEMA: rankings can feel too brittle, too reactive, and too dependent on everyone else in the field. Meyer Squared says M² is a rating system, not a ranking system, and says a fencer will not lose rating simply because the rest of the field improves. The site also says ratings are earned through tournament competition and that a rating stays with a fencer for four years before gradually decreasing by one level every four years. In other words, Meyer Squared is advertising a metric meant to preserve a competitor’s body of work instead of punishing a quiet season or a single bad bracket.

That matters because HEMA already has a ratings ecosystem with real scale. HEMA Ratings says it collects results from as many tournaments as possible and turns them into performance ratings using Glicko-2, the modernized rating approach developed by Harvard statistician Mark Glickman. The site separates weighted rating, which it says directly reflects performance, from rank, which is only the sorted order of fighters. Its fighter index lists 19,575 entries, and its June 2026 mixed and men’s steel longsword page shows 7,409 fighters on the main island. That same update logged 28 new fighters in the month and three comebacks after at least two years inactive, while the May 2026 rapier-and-dagger update showed 1,400 fighters on that main island and 38 new fighters in that period.

Meyer Squared is not entering that conversation from the outside. Its Lynx Cup 2026 page splits open longsword into Divisions 1, 2, and 3, with Division 1 recommended for fencers rated 1450 or higher. Its Scioto Open 2025 page also uses HEMA Ratings to separate Division I from Division II in longsword, again placing the line at 1450. Those choices show Meyer Squared already leaning on ratings to shape brackets, safety, and competitive balance before M² fully arrives.

The broader ecosystem helps explain why the idea may land. The HEMA Alliance backs the worldwide community, runs a global event calendar, and offers HEMA Scorecard as a free open-source tournament management tool. Meyer Squared’s move sits inside that same volunteer-heavy, data-aware culture, where organizers want cleaner administration and competitors want a better read on where they stand. The question now is whether M² becomes a second standard or just another number in a sport still sorting out how to measure itself.