Is Fencing a Sport?
By: Philip Zoppi and Andreas Yilma
NEW HAVEN- Hopkin’s High School fencing team belives fencing is a sport for a variety of reasons.
Emilie Waters, Hopkin’s fencing coach, has seen fencing to be recognized more and more as a sport recently.
“Early on, when I first started fencing and coaching, there was very much the idea that it wasn’t a sport,” said Waters. “With the U.S. team being so successful in the Olympics with fencing has helped out a lot, though.”
The U.S. fencing team made a name for itself in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing winning six medals.
Waters started fencing in high school. Although due to injuries she had playing other sports.
Fencing is when two people square off on a mat that is 4.9 feet wide and 46 feet long. A typical fencing match lasts around 9 minutes and consists of two people trying to hit each other in the strike zone (chest area) to earn points. Whoever gets to 15 points first or has the most points after 9 minutes wins.
Waters believes that one of the reasons some people think fencing isn’t a sport is because it doesn’t involve a lot of running and is an individual activity. Waters says this because sports are usually identified with running and doing physical activity that you don’t do as much in fencing. That’s not the case for her team, though.
Some students were in for a big surprise their first day of practice as Waters made them run and lift weights. Waters is big on physical activity and thinks her students need it if they’re going to be successful at fencing.
Some of the students that joined the fencing team didn’t even look at fencing as a traditional sport.
Miles Lourenco, a senior captain on the Hopkin’s fencing team from Bethany, thinks that people don’t really understand how exhausting fencing can be.
“You may not realize it but going back and forth on the mat over and over again is extremely tiring,” said Lourenco. “If you don’t consider fencing a sport I don’t see how you consider soccer or ice hockey a sport because it requires the same kind of things like hand-eye coordination, changing speeds, and competition.”
Lourenco has had matches where he’s spent over an hour fencing and says it cans cause some of the worst pain on your knees to have them bent for so long.
Lourenco’s fellow captain and senior, Damini Singh, sees one big difference between fencing and other sports. She explained that in fencing you can’t just turn it off and on whenever you want and that if you lose your concentration for just one second that could be the difference between winning and losing.
“I feel like fencing is mostly a mental game,” said Singh. “You train and work so hard for this one five minute period in time. It’s not like football where it’s this big long event.”
The fencing team started practicing in the middle of November and won’t have its first meet until early January. So the team of about 40 students will get in over a month of practicing before they even get to compete. With Lourenco and Singh still on the team they’re expecting to have a good season.
One of the main differences between fencing and the four traditional sports (football, soccer, baseball, and football) is you can’t just got harder or bring more intesity in fencing to make up for a bad start. Lourenco agrees with this.
“I think that going all out and using all your energy is the difference between being a good fencer and a great fencer,” said Lourenco. “In football or sports like that you could go all and out and try to comeback but when you do something like that you lose some of your technique and can make a mistake.”
Waters has seen that this mindset of always trying to stay calm can make a fencer not only be better at fencing but understand how to handle situations in real life better.
“I’ve seen kids who at the beginning of sophomore year will lose a match and just completely blow up to the point where they want to punch something,” said Waters. “Two years later they’re able to walk out of that moment and realize what they did wrong and how they need to get better.”
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