Harvard Qualifies 11 for Upcoming NCAA Championships

It has been a scintillating season for the Harvard fencing teams, with victory seeming unable to stay far from the points of their weapons for long, and their star just looks set to keep on rising as they prepare to go to the NCAA championships on March 16, after a strong showing in the qualifiers yesterday.

After years of disappointment and less-than-satisfying joint victories, the men’s fencing team finally won the Ivy League Fencing Championships outright last weekend for the first time in the history of the competition. They are joined at the top of the Ivy League rankings by the women’s team, who took home the trophy for the second year straight.

The teams also scored a second consecutive IFA win in the combined six-weapon championship at this year’s IFA championships, as well as taking the men’s and women’s team awards.

“The IFAs were great because I think they demonstrated to everyone that we are a real force in fencing at this point,” Timothy Hagamen, co-captain of the men’s team, said.

“We really came out strong in our Princeton match,” said Harvard’s other co-captain, David Jakus. “Everyone did their part, and it capped off an undefeated season—it’s nice to add to the history books.”

Previous to last year the Harvard women’s team had never been Ivy Champions either, and Co-captain Chloe Stinetorf said that it was exciting to prove that last year’s success was no fluke with this consecutive victory.

“It’s a really good group of people and I think the program is just going to keep going up,” she said. “It’s exciting to see the Harvard fencing program go from the bottom when I was a freshman to the top now, with Peter Brand’s coaching.”

“After winning the entire women’s team jumped into the Penn pool,” Anne Austin, other co-captain of the women’s team, recalled. “[But] while the meet with Princeton was the most important part of the weekend, the 108-year-old IFA competition was also important for us as both individuals and a team. We managed to take 7 of 9 team trophies.”

Yesterday’s NCAA Northeast Regional qualifiers for the championships in Texas was no different, with the Crimson qualifying 11 fencers out of a possible 12—vital because the championships are based on an aggregate score of all fencers from a school.

A new format in the qualifiers worked to some players’ disadvantage though, according to Hagamen, as a fencer might happen to be lotteried into a very difficult pool of contestants.

He cited senior Julian Rose, the only fencer not to qualify, as one such example.

“He didn’t do well in the pools, so he had a tough round,” Hagamen said of Rose’s loss in epee. “He fenced very well though, and last year we only qualified 10 so it is an improvement.”

Austin agreed that the format change shook things up a bit.

“Despite the home turf advantage for Harvard, it was an uphill battle for the team with lower initial rankings than we had expected due to [the] new format for the event,” she said.

With the unprecedented qualifying rate, the captains are optimistic about the championships, even against traditional powerhouses such as Penn State, Notre Dame, and Ohio State, schools that offer sports scholarships.

“We have a good chance of breaking the top three, and if we could come ahead of any of them it would be really great as we are not a scholarship school,” Jakus said.

Stinetorf agreed.

“I think this year as we’ve qualified 11 and everyone has been fencing so well all season we really have a chance. It’s within our reach.”

—Staff writer Alexandra C. Bell can be reached at acbell@fas.harvard.edu