Tournaments can have many different types of restrictions in different levels of configurations. These include but are not limited to:
Age restrictions
Gender restrictions
Rating restictions
Club membership restrictions
Division membership restrictions
Maximum participant number restrictions
National Governing Body membership restrictions
and more!
These can also be configured by a Tournament Organizer to be optionally enforced or required as a part of your registration process.
These can also be combined in ways that are not immediately obvious for the new AskFRED user. For example, if someone marks an event as USA Fencing sanctioned, requiring USA Fencing membership to participate, and also has a rating restriction in place, AskFRED will subsequently use the USA Fencing rating currently reported against the fencer's membership number and NOT the one they self-report on AskFRED. However, if the tournament is not USA Fencing sanctioned, we will use the one self-reported on your AskFRED profile. This is true for most fencer attributes - we pull first from the official source of truth for officially sanctioned events.
Similarly, for USA Fencing sanctioned events, we follow the age restriction rules set forth by USA Fencing, which can be somewhat confusing. You can read more about those here.
If you find yourself in a situation where you're having issues registering due to restrictions in place on an event, the first place to look is to ensure that your USA Fencing membership is correctly representative of your information, possibly updating it to address these issues.
If you're unable to resolve these issues, or have further need of help, you can always reach out to support using the chat bubble in the bottom right of your screen and we can further assist in the situation.