Building the Steel Mace Collective

A PSA Into the Void

One of the strangest things about falling in love with steel mace is how hard it can be to find other people who practice it.

After enough time hunting for classes, piecing together instruction, and driving unreasonable distances for coaching, I got tired of waiting to stumble across a local community by accident. So I decided to try something simple: I posted on Reddit.

It was less a grand announcement and more a small PSA into the void. I was basically asking whether there were any other steel mace people in the Seattle area who wanted to connect, train, or at least confirm that I was not the only person out here swinging a weighted lever around my condo and local parks.

A couple of people responded. Not a flood. Not the beginning of some instant movement. Just a couple. But a couple was enough to make me think there might be something worth building.

Seattle Steel Mace Collective

So I created a Discord server and called it Seattle Steel Mace Collective.

At the moment, it is still small. Very small. It is not exactly exploding with activity, and I have no idea yet what it will become. But that is fine. Every community starts as a handful of people trying to find each other. This one just happens to revolve around an obscure training tool that most people have never touched.

The best part came almost immediately.

Finding Your People

One of the people who responded on Reddit and I ended up meeting at a park. That alone felt like progress. Until then, steel mace had mostly lived in my condo, in YouTube videos, in occasional classes, and in my own determination to keep learning a tool that still feels oddly rare in the wild. Meeting another actual human in person who wanted to swing a mace already felt like a win.

Then he introduced me to his crew of steel mace swingers, and I got to meet them at Coulon Park in Washington.

That was the moment something shifted.

There is a particular kind of joy in finding your people around a practice that has mostly lived in solitude. Not just because someone else understands what a 360 is, or why offset load feels so different from conventional weights, or why anyone would willingly spend time learning to move a heavy steel lever in circles. But because it turns a private obsession into something shared. Real. Local. Embodied. Playful.

How liberating it feels to swing a steel mace into the sand as a collective.

Until then, steel mace had felt a little like being part of a secret society with very poor marketing.

Suddenly it felt less solitary.

Just a Start

That is what I want the Steel Mace Collective to be. Just a place where local people who love this strange and wonderful tool can find each other, train together, and make the practice a little less obscure.

It is still just a start. A Reddit post. A Discord server. A few conversations. A park meetup. A small sign that there may be more of us out there than it first seems.

I do not know exactly where it will go from here.

But I am curious to find out.