Although it was an early Saturday morning, the SPA campus was bustling with people. On February 24, 11 different schools brought their fencing teams to SPA for the State tournament. Starting at 8 a.m., the Junior Men’s Foil teams arrived first at the school to begin warmups and prepare for the long day ahead of them.
Although warm ups are typically done on the fencing strips in the gym, because of the high turnout at the State tournament, the SPA fencers started warmups in the athletic bridge above the gym.
In fencing, the strip, or piste, is the area that the fencers use while fencing. These strips are made up of lightweight, conductive metals, typically copper alloy, and they have markings that let the fencers know where certain boundaries are.
Since the State tournament was a large event with many schools, the tournament took place over two days in both the large and small gyms, as well as in Driscoll down the theater hallway.
On Saturday, the first day of the tournament, the competition focused on individual events only, and there were over 200 entries across all the schools that attended. The events were Junior Men’s Épée, Saber and Foil, as well as Junior Women’s Épée, Saber and Foil.
Despite the packed gym, previous experiences with tournaments, such as the Junior Olympics the week before, allowed captain Milan Mishra to easily keep calm and focus on his game.
“[The Junior Olympics] was really good practice for this weekend. Especially because the competition is much harder, and I was able to work on different aspects of my game that I don’t normally get to practice here, so that was really helpful,” said Mishra.
Along with Mishra, senior Maik Nguyen also participated in the Junior Olympics with the Twin Cities Fencing Club, and their familiarity with the sport helped them land in 6th and 9th place respectively in Junior Men’s Épée at the end of the first day.
“It’s a pretty tough season because we lost two coaches, and then we only had one new coach join, so […] it’s a lot to organize because last year, we had 173 events, and this year, we jumped 100 more,” said fencing head and Foil coach Dong-Ying “Sasha” Pai.
On top of the unusually high number of new fencers joining the team this year, the team of nearly 40 members also lost coaching staff, resulting in changes in the flow of practices and organizing competitions. But regardless, for the team, the show must go on.
Day one of State closed with SPA taking positions in the top three in Junior Women’s Saber out of 15 entries and Junior Men’s Saber out of 33 entries.
The second day of the tournament consisted of 39 teams competing in six different team events that the individual fencers competed in the previous day. SPA had an entry in each event category.
Pai said, “We have a really good chance to win the Women’s overall. […] Foil is pretty hard because right now [there’s a large Foil] population in Minnesota, a lot of foil fencers. But we got a good Saber and Épée team for both men and women, so that’s the goal to focus on these two events.”
Although every team’s members fenced separately, the team aspect of the events allowed them to add up their points for the final rankings, and as the day progressed, Coach Pai’s predictions were deemed true. Spartans Men’s Épée and Women’s Saber placed second in their events out of seven and three total teams respectively; Followed by Men’s Saber and Women’s Épée placing third in their events out of four and five total teams respectively.
“Everyone worked very hard when they tried this [tournament]. Fencing is an individual sport, but […] they can bring this individual sport to become a team sport. [They worked] hard to build up this team culture,” said Pai.
After a season full of collaborations with new fencers and navigating through SPA’s loss of two fencing coaches, the State tournament concluded the 2023-2024 fencing season with Junior Women’s Foil finishing as the last event of day two.
