The good.
There was an intensity that we drilled into new fighters as part of the group. The saying went "die spectacularly, or live trying". Our golden rule was that fighter for fighter we should kill 2 opponents for every one of us that died. Now, that didn't inherently mean that every person in the group could automatically beat any other 2 fighters on the field. Much of that was related to teamwork and learning to move well together. If 2 people died while fighting a group of 6 fighters and 1 guy backed all of that pile of 6 that still counted. By having a high priority target (like myself) pull the attention of several enemies it created openings for my teammates to either back that group or win a fight somewhere else on the field because of a local advantage that having me fight 2, 3, 4, 6 people (even briefly) would create. We created intensity by always vowing to fight our hardest, to give 100% when we fought together and donned our tabards. At any other time it was optional, but when the tabards were on, or while you were fighting a unit mate the idea was to give and receive the best you had.
Another thing that went well for the most part was the culture aspect of the unit. We had 4 oaths that pretty much everyone forgot the letter of but they wound up living by the spirit of them anyways. The first one was about being honorable, and that meant that by making ourselves better we'd make the field better as well. No matter how shitty other people were, winning only counted if it was done with clean honor. The intensity that we had helped with that. The third oath was about respect. That meant that you treated everyone well, and everyone equally. That once you became better then another fighter you were still a decent human being to them and if you happened to beat a fighter who you though was better then you, you did so graciously realizing that they still probably had things to teach you if you'd just listen. The last oath was about camaraderie, the idea being that everyone was an equal in the group, regardless of their year of experience fighting, or relative veterancy/position within the unit. So, even though I ran the unit, I was still just as culpable and human as the rest of the unit.
We used to do a drill called 5 minutes in hell where you'd fight teams of 2, 3 or 4 of your unit mates depending on your level of skill. You would keep fighting the same group until you killed all of them in one go, which always wound up being a huge achievement. The second you stopped resetting quickly for the next round, or had to stop to catch your breath you were done. This meant that a person could give their all and push themselves in a way that was safe. As soon as the person was done, having cleared one group, no groups or many groups they could collapse knowing that they'd done a good job at doing a hard thing. I think I heard someone use a turn of phrase for that called "shoot for the moon" thinking. Where basically we challenged fighters with an impossible task where they were given the chance to fail indefinitely with no negative repercussions, so that when 1 out of 20 or 1 out of 50 rounds they finally succeeded it was infinitely sweeter. It also meant that you got used to failing, and used to not taking yourself too seriously.
Because of the 5 minutes in hell drill our teamwork was also phenomenal. All that time we spent fighting with and against each other meant that the majority of people in the unit knew EXACTLY how every other person in the unit moved. It meant that when we fought out on the field we were generally synced with one another without having to speak much. Because we were usually the smaller group out on the field it meant that we had to do those things well because we couldn't hold together as a line. Our teamwork, our ability to skirmish, to be fleet of foot, and our ability to work well together is most of what carried us during our inception.
The bad
In many ways the unit was simply myself. When I had energy and time, when I was in a good place, the unit flourished. When I was low on energy, when I was having a bad day, when I didn't find the time to give to rest of the people in the unit it quickly would start to fall apart. One of the things I did poorly was convince other people in the unit to help take responsibility for running it. I did not make other people leaders / in charge of things. I did not set up systems so that it would run autonomously without me. To be fair, most of the members of the unit had only a few years of fighting under their belt even as it started to mature, but that meant that when I faltered so too did the unit as a whole.
The unit did not scale well at all. What had worked when I was training between 1 and 3 people at a time quickly started to not work when I had to teach 6 people divergent styles all at once. Teaching 3 people who to fight an aggressive, sprinting shield is totally doable. Trying to teach 1 person to florentine, one person to defensive shield, 2 people to neutral shield, one person to aggressive shield and one person to fight with a red all at the same time, does not work. Unfortunately that meant splitting my time between the different people, and their level of skill got diluted as a result. I do my best teaching when I can mentor someone one on one and work with them over time, slowly tuning their muscle memory for how to throw each strike, as each bit of correct form gets built block by block from the ground up. What I wound up trying to do instead was get the blades who were a few years in to teach their new unit mates the basics while I tried to drill on the advanced stuff... but unfortunately it meant that some of the building blocks for form got off because they were new to teaching as well.
Additionally. The unit started off as a fleet of foot skirmish unit, with entirely melee weapons (no support gear of any kind). When we developed into a group with a proper set of weapons/gear to be a wall we quickly fell apart, because all of the advanced fighters wanted to skirmish, even when we outnumbered, and out geared our enemies. Not to say that flanking doesn't have it's advantages... but it's a tool with a time and a place. When you're the dominant force on the field what you do is crush the smaller forces underneath your front line like meat going into a grinder. Sadly, this was a thing that we never learned to do well. As the unit grew in size getting everyone together on the same field started to be much more of a problem and unit cohesion began to break down. Once that happened any remaining semblance of teamwork faded away. Polearms ran out in front, shieldman watched flankers run by them, our archer would shoot at shields instead of enemy support weapons/flankers, and more often then not, the unit that had been known for maneuvering and backstabbing was suddenly getting backed itself.
The ugly
One of the things about running a unit is about keeping drama to a minimum. Once that starts to get out of hand it becomes very difficult to patch things back together. At a certain maximum threshold of people the unit basically got split in half. One half of the unit was some semblance of the original unit that I had created. They were lean mean fighting machines. They fought hard and fast. They fought because they loved the game and they were in it to fight regardless of the outcome. The other group was the best things of the social aspect... but completely lacking in the combat department. They were friendly and had a good time, they volunteered at events, they had a good reputation but they weren't great fighters. They didn't push themselves, they didn't train hard, and even when they did come to practice they'd often spend their time sitting on the sidelines just hanging out with people. That initial divide between the fighters and the social club never really got resolved unfortunately. I kept trying to push the unit back towards being the thing it had started as, but in so doing I watched it break and splinter before my eyes. In an effort to try and get people on board I begged, I pleaded, I cajoled, I threatened to try and bring back the kind of intensity that had originally been present. In the end I tried to compromise in order to please everyone. Instead I wound up descending into madness myself. Eventually, I wound up quitting the unit myself because I was so frustrated by trying to get people to care about the unit in the same way that I did.
The unit, already in turmoil as the result of being divided received, very nearly, it's death blow when I wound up out for 4 months with a broken leg. That meant no sparring with people. No fighting, no teaching people. It meant that I didn't get a chance to even make it out to a lot of things because without that leg I wasn't authorized to drive. When I did finally make it back to fighting, I was no longer the fighter I used to be before I'd broken myself. I've talked about this in other posts but long story short, my ability to do things like - take hits, communicate well, process my own shots, have field awareness, track incoming swings, throw wrap shots - is all the result of a shit ton of practice and plenty of maintenance by fighting multiple times a week. After I spent 4 months out of the game, it all went away. My muscles for throwing swings atrophied. My eyes slowed down so I couldn't track swings anymore. My hit taking became TERRIBLE and my communication was just as bad. With that I wasn't really seen as the leader of the unit that I used to be as well. What had carried the unit previously had been my fighting skill, the respect that the immediate area had for me and my consistent honor. With all that out the window trying to fix the problems for a unit already off the rails became extremely difficult.
In spite of all the infrastructure that I'd set up in the way of a playbook for battle calls (which most folks didn't take the time to learn), in spite of a set of documents outlining the purpose of the unit, the bylaws for how it operated, the basic outline of what training was set up as, and getting the buy in from multiple people for what I thought the unit was... eventually it went under. By the time we'd hit the end of the units lifetime I'd managed to find a place to screen print tabards and belt flags
In the end...
If I had to go back and do it all over again... I think I still probably would in spite of my eventual bitterness. I loved the early days of that unit when we'd fight as a unit of 2 or 3 of us, eventually reaching up to 6, and we'd cut the enemy up as we danced between them. I loved the intensity of the fighting that we brought to each other which is hard to find even out on a national field. I even loved the social aspects of hanging out with a group of people that felt like my family. I think that if done properly you can have a great culture on AND off the field but it has to start with clearly stating what a unit is. The more people join a unit the more the vision changes as each person adds their own impression of what it should be. As the unit grew in size, gained and lost members I always remembered initially how much it hurts to lose your own people. What eventually came out of it was this though "a unit is a home, and I believe that everyone needs to find their home. If they aren't in the right unit they should leave it, even if that means leaving us, because everyone deserves to have a place where they feel they belong". In the end leaders from The Crown, The Sith and The Wardens all spent some time in the unit learning the principles of being better fighters and also, hopefully, being better human being while on and off the field.
So go out there dear reader. Find a good unit for yourself in the great wide world of fighting, or start your own if you don't find a place that suites you. Hopefully if you do wind up starting a unit you can learn from the ones who have passed before you :-P.
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