Tournament Season? Tournament Countries? Where and when does HEMA happen

I’ve always had in my mind that the summer is the busy time for HEMA. Even though we, as a community, run events year round it always felt like there was a tournament “season” centered around the summer. And to my surprise when talking to someone else they mentioned how the summer was a slow patch for tournaments. Something completely contrary to my experience.

And like any good empiricist, I looked for data to confirm either way.

HEMA Season

First question, is there a HEMA tournament season? When facing a question like this I turn to the largest database of HEMA tournaments, HEMA Ratings. And, being the gracious supporters of analytics they are, I was provided a list of all events in their database sorted by date.

So I was wrong. In summer there’s actually a lull in tournaments. If there is any sort of tournament season it would actually be in the fall.

But wait! Maybe it’s a North American thing.

Nope, still wrong. But interestingly enough the October to December stretch is much less busy than it is in the overall world data.

But while we’re here…

Of course once I get my hands on a data set curiosity takes over.

We have a rough idea of when events are being hosted, but where are they being hosted?

The United States comes out as having by far the most events per year. Over twice that of the next largest! Enough so that let’s have another look at that graph, zoomed in a bit so we can see what other countries are doing a bit better.

Not all countries are equal

Of course this isn’t a completely fair comparison. Though the United States has by far the most competitions going on, it is also a much bigger place than any of the European countries individually. If we now look at the number of HEMA events per population…

We can see the United States jump right to the lower half of the rankings. Unsurprisingly we can see countries like Slovakia, Sweden, and Finland up near the top. Quite surprisingly we see Ireland dominate. And Brazil, with its 3 recorded HEMA tournaments and massive population, is bringing up the rear.

And one last question, what happens when we look at it by land area? Something all the dwarf sized European countries should enjoy.

No surprise, the countries that were on top stay on top. I was half expecting Taiwan to win, but it turns out it’s actually bigger than I thought. And to my delight Canada isn’t last! We just need a HEMA group in a place like Luxembourg or Singapore to organize a single event that will catapult them to the top of these ratings.

Wrapping Up

Naturally this data has a significant bias, in that it only reflects events which have submitted themselves to HEMA ratings. Certain countries have more formal tournaments and more detailed records, and will thus get a larger share of their events captured. Likewise if the competition structure tends towards many smaller events you might not get them captured at all.

Which may be what lead me to my original thoughts about tournament season. It isn’t that the summer is significantly busier with formal tournaments, but there are a lot of demonstrations and other activities. Making it a busy time of year for other reasons.

Sean Franklin

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