Lightspeed Saber appealed to Dakota Eggert differently than other sports like boxing and karate. He cites that the culture of Lightspeed Saber keeps him coming back to continue training and teaching. In 2019, Eggert founded his Star Temple school and has seen the Lightspeed Saber League grow since he joined. Today, Eggert discusses the culture he loves so much and some crossover from Olympic and historical fencing. All images provided by Dakota Eggert.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Welcome Dakota and thank you for joining us to talk about Lightspeed Saber!
Dakota Eggert: Thank you for having me here!
MAYTT: What was it about Lightspeed Saber that made you want to join? What about Lightspeed Saber keeps you coming back to it?
DE: It didn’t take a lot of convincing to get me in. I was at a local convention. I wandered into a thing where a guy was yelling, “Lightsaber fighting! Lightsaber fighting!” I gave it a try and I fought with a guy that I happened to know when I walked in the room – it was so weird because we knew each other. I fell in love with it standing there. The next weekend, I was out at their practice learning the sport and I wound up buying my gear that week. I fell in love with it the longer I’ve been in it, especially lightsaber dueling in general – the longer I’ve been in that sport, the more I fell in love with it.
The culture really keeps me coming back. I’ve been in a lot of sports growing up and recently I’ve figured out it’s more about the culture than anything else. Everyone there, similar to another sport I do – I do sumo wrestling – the culture in both of those sports is where everyone cares about each other; they all want to greet each other, hug each other. If you don’t know someone, pretty much everyone is open to talk to you. I’ve been in a lot of sports where it’s not the case. Every time that I meet someone new in the sport, people are super excited about, “Oh my god, you do lightsaber fencing? That’s awesome!” It’s an instant conversation started. People are always super into it when you talk about it, just in the general public. It’s just really fun and I’m a very competitive person and the option to compete in a lot of different styles just keeps me coming back and wanting more.
Being a part of the League is something fun and getting to do this sport is more fun than it is a sport. It is so enjoyable that every day I go out and practice – I practice for half an hour every day – I smile so much. The sport has brought so many smiles to so many people.
MAYTT: Before moving on, what is the official way to refer to this sport?
DE: The one that we are talking about here is Lightspeed Saber League (LSL). There are three different leagues; two different official leagues and one that is just starting up. I’m in Lightspeed as the Regional Director, I’m on board the one that’s starting up, and I am trying to get into the last one, which is TSL, The Saber Legion.
MAYTT: You previously trained in boxing and karate before coming to Lightspeed Saber. How have those prior experiences assisted you in learning Lightspeed Saber?
DE: They gave me a foundation that I could work off of. But going from a bare-handed sport or a gloved sport like boxing into something where you’re now extending your reach by four feet, it’s a strong learning curve. I had the basics of how to move, how to get off the lines, how to move around in the ring from boxing and karate, but I didn’t understand how to use something that extended my reach that wasn’t a staff. In Lightspeed, you aren’t allowed to use a staff. They helped me with a foundation, and I built from a foundation.
MAYTT: Lightspeed Saber League dubs your school’s fencers as the “fastest fencers in the league!” What course of action did you take to earn such a title?
DE: That comes from my boxing history, and I have another member who was the runner up in the 2022 Las Vegas tournament and he does Muay Thai, so we’ve been teaching everyone how to move by staying light on your feet. We teach people to try not to plant as much as you might think from karate or HEMA. We have a lot of folks that come out of HEMA, and they plant as to not get knocked off your feet. This sport is very hard to get knocked off your feet. Someone really has to swing with some gusto to really knock you off your feet. So, a lot of them had the habit of planting their feet. Once we started to train that out of everyone, we were a little bit faster than a lot of the other teams that were planting their feet. Outside of that, it’s been footwork, and drilling footwork all the time. Weve recently gotten some help from the original Texas team that has disbanded. He was notorious for switching his feet and hands quickly to change his angle as fast as possible and he gave us some instruction and we were able to use that to speed up our combat. That’s about how we got to be the fastest in the League – just being able to switch up our angles and being light on our feet.
MAYTT: The is amazing. Have there been any overlap with other weapons-based martial arts and how have they received Lightspeed Saber?
DE: Our founder, Cang Snow, was an Olympic fencer and he’s pretty darn good. He rolled that in pretty well. One of the other local groups that my group intermingles a lot, the owner of the group is a world renown sabre fencer, and he was able to trickle sabre fencing into Lightspeed really well.
I’ve mostly seen a lot of the interest come from folks that are in either HEMA or, for lack of a better term, the geeky population that doesn’t do a lot of exercise and this is their form of exercise. But as far as translating, HEMA sabre fencing, and fencing seem to translate the best over from that. That seems to be where a lot of the interest comes in, “Oh, that seems really similar to my sport with a different rule set. Can I come try it out?” lo and behold, they love it just as much, hopefully, as the other thing that they were into previously.
MAYTT: You mention HEMA and Olympic fencing as crossovers, and they have a sort of curriculum to base their study off of. Does Lightspeed Saber have something similar?
DE: Each team has their own curriculum. There’s no set, “This is step one. This is step two. This is step three,” across the entire League. There are foundational videos that I might recommend to someone who might not be picking it up in the ways that I would like them to do, but there’s no set curriculum. Every time, I do something a little bit different. One of the teams in Texas really flourished because they have an extremely well-rounded and well-based curriculum. I’ve seen teams that have no curriculum; they just spar all the time. And I’ve seen times that have a mix: they might start with the first twenty minutes with drilling footwork, attack work, blocking, etc., but there’s no LSL curriculum. There’s just team curriculums.
MAYTT: When did you establish your Star Temple?
DE: Star Temple originally got established in October of 2019. The former Southern Regional Director reached out to me and said, “Hey man. I know you’re really putting in the hours and you can’t really afford to be part of another team right now.” The other team in Texas was charging a fee that I couldn’t afford on my undergraduate budget. He asked, “How do you feel about starting a team for free? I’ll help you get it running. I have loaner gear that we could sell to your team at an extremely discounted rate. And you can crank up your own stuff if you want.” That sounds awesome. He and another one of my members helped me get it running; that member stepped down from his officer position at one point. We got it running. We had the full time approved by LSL a month after I had started it, so we had all the members that we needed to get started; we had all the loaner gear. We got our stamp of approval on November 19, 2019.
MAYTT: That was a quick turnaround.
DE: It really helps when someone is like, “Hey, I’m going to give you loaner gear at an extreme discount and I’m going to help you do all the paperwork.” He was in a position where he could approve my team. Now I’m in that position that he was in where if someone wanted to start a team and they showed me that they had the drive and the ethic, I could approve it in the same amount of turnaround.
MAYTT: How do you approach teaching Lightspeed Saber?
DE: I am a very trial by fire kind of person, especially if somebody comes up to me; I have a lot of people that come up to me and say, “I have experience in swordplay. I think I know what I’m doing.” I set them up with someone and I want to see them run through a couple things really quickly. I like to tailor-make my curriculum, so I do a big set warm up with everyone. We’ll do footwork drills, handwork drills, and we might do some partner drills. Once I get through that, I typically have that person that said they have experience and I’ll run them through a small match – something very short, very simple – just so I can get a feel. Then I’ll pull them aside with one of the instructors on my team and we’ll work with them, and we’ll teach them the basics. We will also give pointers of, “Hey, you open up a lot because you said you used a two-handed weapon. Right now, you’re using one-handed. Do you want to switch back to two-handed and help you work through this?” I like to tailor-make a curriculum for each of my fighters. I feel that helps people grow faster than having this widespread curriculum that I’d experienced through karate.
I’m lucky to be in a position where I can work with everyone on a personal level and be able to watch and explore with all my members how to best give them the basics and bud their own style to go with the basics.
MAYTT: From your knowledge, how did Lightspeed Saber get started?
DE: I, unfortunately, wasn’t there in the very beginning but I did come on very early. I came on before the Las Vegas tournament. From what I have heard, Cang, the guy who runs lightspeed saber league, was an Olympic fencer and went, “How can I make this more interesting?” He loved Star Wars and he saw someone attach lights to their fencing equipment, so it almost looked Star War-esque. He asked himself, “What if we do that with actual lightsabers?” From there, he was able to form his own group. They were having fun in their own group, and he turned it into the league. That was when the team I was originally a part of caught wind of it and the owner of that team went up and learned from Cang and brought it back to Texas so that it could grow here. Once it blew up in Texas, it started to blow up in other states across the country. We ended up working our way to the international level, piece by piece. Especially with 2020 coming in and LSL not being a huge mega league with thousands and thousands of people, it really hurt the league for a little bit and then we flourished. By 2022, when I went to Las Vegas, there were ten teams there; this year, there were twelve. It has made leaps and bounds over the years using social media and other things. It’s blown up and I’ve been lucky to be there for most of the journey since Cang came from Olympic fencing into running lightspeed.
MAYTT: I see. What are some of the League’s plans to expand further across the country?
DE: I have to, unfortunately, speak on a smaller scale about my region. In my region, we are doing a lot of social media work, trying to get folks to come in locally and start up groups. I know I go to conventions and stuff and do demos and have these huge panels. I know that’s also happening in the other sections, but I can only speak to what I do, unfortunately. I go to these huge conventions. My largest demo to date was over 600 people. We actually had to block people from coming in because we had reached more capacity with the main stage at the convention than the room could handle. So, I know there’s a strong demand for this thing and we’re going. Recently, we just had a team start up about an hour from where I am because I had invited some friends out to one of meetings a little bit ago and they went home and told everybody; “Hey, this is really cool.” The more and more that we use social media, the more we’ve been growing and growing. We just got three new members from an Instagram post we’ve made two weeks ago. They just started showing up. It’s growing and expanding, using the power of the internet, which is a great thing because I am no salesman, but I can make an Instagram post.
MAYTT: I’ve talked to more traditional martial artists, and they haven’t touched or even want to touch social media, but using the virtual option to expand your reach, I think that is ingenuity. You brought up The Saber Legion earlier. What are the differences between them and Lightspeed in light-based fencing?
DE: Each light-based fencing league deals with a different size of blade. That’s one of the easiest things to see. LSL uses the smallest of the three because the prime focus is how to be fast, how do we be the fastest sport on earth, and the fastest light-based sport on earth. They’ve come up with a light blade that moves very fast, that whips through the air as fast as you can as you can make it whip with your wrist. It’s based solely on speed and wearing light armor.
TSL, the other one that’s established, is at almost the opposite end of the spectrum. They use very thick, heavy-grade blades that require you to wear armor. You wear a much thicker set of armor. Armor is actually required versus LSL, outside of a few key pieces, where armor isn’t required. They require all that armor for bodily protection. But that sport is a little closer to kendo where you can make those big swings. You can thrust, you can have these larger movements and the blades don’t whip as much. They’re a little stiffer, a little bit heavier. They’re both very fun; both very exhilarating. It is more of picking your fun between those two.
The one that is coming up is a blade that’s right between the two. While LSL uses three-quarter inch, TSL uses one inch, and the new league that is totally unnamed uses seven-eighths inch. It’s dead in the middle and the armor requirements are much closer to LSL requirements and they have a little more stringent power swinging rules to protect the fighters versus armor as opposed to TSL. And, it has a very similar ruleset to LSL from what I’ve seen. It’s very new and very unformed. It’s almost entirely untried. It’s something that I’ve seen a lot of want for in my own group to see something on top of LSL that we can do with LSL in conjunction. Something to branch out and expand our horizons without having the budget to get the armor.
MAYTT: Are there any plans to work with any of these other light-based fencing leagues?
DE: At one point, there was a plan to make a bigger coalition between the leagues, but I’m not sure what’s going on with that. I’m not as involved with it as some other folks are. There’s a distance between me and headquarters back in California.
A few of my fighters do want to do TSL on top of LSL. With the new league coming up, from what I understand, a few of them want to join that as well when that does arise. My group, personally, will be in at least two. As far as the league as a whole, I’m not sure if they plan ever doing that bigger coalition. I’ve been out of the loop for that one. At one point, it was a no for joining up with other leagues.
MAYTT: Who would you consider to be a pioneer or a major disseminator of Lightspeed Saber? What sets these individuals apart from their peers.
DE: I would say Andre Gonzales. He is a wiz at social media. He’s a whiz at filming, photos, and getting the word out. He is just so good at all of that stuff and he’s really good at lightspeed. He’s very kind to everyone he meets, so he’s a great representative and really helps us grow. Our owner, Cang, is pretty good at making it spread but I really think Andre is a key player in the growth of lightspeed as a whole.
MAYTT: Final question; if someone is interested in learning Lightspeed Saber, what is the process to join the Lightspeed Saber League?
DE: Joining the league, what they would first do is they would either find a club or they could make their own club. If they’re making their own club, they contact one of the regional directors on the LSL site or Cang directly and figure out what the requirements are, get rockin’ and rollin’, and get approved and have their own club.
But they can also go to a local club, which makes things a lot easier. A lot of clubs have the first three or four meetings free, and they give free loaner gear for a few meetings. They’ll teach you all the basics; they’ll talk you through it. I know for my team when someone comes, their first three meetings are free, the first three loaner days are free – so they get all the gear that they want completely free of charge – just so that they can give it a shot and really see what it’s about and hopefully enjoy it. Once they join a team, they’re in the league; they’re one of us. They become part of the family.
MAYTT: Thank you again for speaking with us about one of the fastest fencing leagues out there!
DE: Thank you; it was enjoyable!
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