FanPost
Regular listeners to the Earned 5-Star pod know of the Boys’ (especially Josh’s) love of our identity as a sword school, and I think that love is well-placed (though I’m obviously biased). For anyone who didn’t already know, ND has more fencing national titles than any other sport, including football. We generally have a decent shot to win it all every year – we’ve only ever finished out of the top 5 once this century (6th in 2014) – which always makes this time of year exciting. In my annual process of getting pumped up for the 4-day mini-Madness that is the NCAA fencing tourney (starting today!), I was just going over the qualifier list (see pages 6-7 of this) to see who other than Notre Dame qualified 12 fencers and I was happy to discover that our path to the title is unusually smooth this year.
I’m going to assume that most casual fans don’t know how the NCAA fencing tournament is set up, so let me first give you a quick primer. Fencing consists of three weapons – foil, épée and sabre – and so there are six events (men’s and women’s events for each weapon because the championship has been coed since 1990). Each event is fenced in a round-robin format, with each bout a fencer wins contributing 1 point to their school’s total; the school with the most points at the end wins the team title. In case you’re curious, there are also individual titles – the top 4 fencers in each event face off in semis and a final to determine the champion – but those extra bouts do not affect the team standings. Each school can send a maximum of two competitors for each of the six events (with limited slots available per region) so, as you can imagine, qualifying 12 fencers at regionals is a big deal and goes a long ways to determining your odds of winning the whole thing.
Typically there are around three or so schools each year who qualify 12, along with a few who qualify 11 but have a couple extra-dominant fencers, which makes the competition, well, pretty competitive. But this year, while Columbia is the only other school who matches ND with 12 qualifiers, no one else has more than 10 (and even then, there are only two schools with 10 – Harvard and Princeton). That means that, even before the first “En garde! Prêtes? Allez!”, this is just a two-team race.
Columbia will not allow things to be too easy; though their men are ranked second to ours, their women return the favor. But I should point out that the rankings are based largely on duals meets and are more a marker of team depth than just overall talent, whereas the NCAA tournament format only requires that the two competitors you send in each event have a good couple of days. I have a lot of confidence in our 12, which includes several Olympians. And I have a lot of confidence in Coach Gia and his staff’s ability to keep them focused throughout a mentally grueling and physically exhausting round-robin format.
I look forward to feverishly refreshing the bout results page every few minutes for the next four days. I look forward to getting to catch one of my favorite sports on TV in a non-Olympic year (also available for free streaming thanks to host Penn State’s YouTube Channel). And I look forward to having you join me in spirit as we cheer on our Irish to victory. GO IRISH! BEAT [everyone else]!