Head Instructor
With 30 years of martial arts training, Randy is one of the foremost practitioners and trainers of Western Martial Arts in North America today. His unmatched breadth of training, intense research into both historical martial arts and modern training methods, solid competition record and history of training champions combine to give Scatha Combat Guild a firm foundation of growth.
That’s the sales pitch, anyway. Sounds good to me! To give it a little more detail, I started training in martial arts in September of 1980, when I was 12. It appealed to me immediately. I think I can count the days I’ve missed training on two hands, maybe…even if a lot of that training had to be done on the sly, I’ve always done something, every day. Probably two-thirds of my brain is thinking about martial arts at any given time, or something related to it. I’ve trained in a lot of styles since that first class…not always by choice. My family moved a lot, so I had a lot of chances to try new schools and new styles.
I always felt like I was looking for something more, though. I started to study the arts I wasn’t training in, sometimes hanging out and watching classes with a notebook in hand, chatting with instructors and students, and reading every book available on the different styles and history of martial arts. I learned a lot.
It wasn’t until I had a rapier put in my hand that I finally found my true calling, though. It was like starting in martial arts all over again…but with all my learning skills in place. The main avenue for instruction was through the Society for Creative Anachronism, a medieval recreation society with over 30,000 members worldwide. I was eventually awarded a White Scarf, the highest award the society gives for excellence in rapier combat. It was a long and difficult path! Along the way I not only deepened my interest in historical arts, but expanded it tremendously.
I started out by reading the historical manuals that had been translated into English, and then started to do my own translations…slowly and painfully at first. It goes quicker now. Did you know that if you spend enough time reading Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese that you can just about read Latin? It’s kind of neat, really.
I got kind of frustrated with the disinterest the SCA group had in historical instruction. It didn’t make any sense to me. Here I was gallivanting all over the place learning things, burning hours a day re-writing old manuals into something that made sense to me, and no one seemed to care? Hard for my ego to take. So, with Devon Boorman, I started up Academie Duello to teach the rest of the city Western Martial Arts. That worked really well! The school was a great success…but not so much for me. The school was moving in a direction that was good for it, but not for me. I needed to explore, to learn more, to get back to my martial roots.
So, I started up another school as an experiment…which resulted in where we are today. …a few months shy of 30 years of martial arts training. Didn’t turn out the way I expected!