Over the weekend, women’s fencing placed sixth out of seven teams at the Ivy League Fencing Championships, defeating Cornell in a ferocious 14-to-13 upset.
The tournament marked a culmination of efforts to “renew” the Brown women’s fencing program, Head Coach Charlene Kai Yan Liu told The Herald. This season, the team hired three new coaches, including Liu, and implemented new practice regimens.
Liu emphasized that players’ enthusiastic embrace of changes in the program boosted team morale and led to camaraderie that manifested during the championships.
Liu and some players said that this season’s changes were visible in the team’s upset win over Cornell, who was seeded above Brown. After each bout, win or lose, fencers from all three of the Bruno squads provided either thunderous cheering or emotional support for their teammates.
“The team has been consistently practicing four times a week, which is an increase from the previous years,” Liu said.
These practices take place on-campus and feature specialized instruction from weapon-specific coaches. Assistant coaches Bin Huang and Irem Ülkü lead foil and saber respectively, and Liu focuses on epee. Last season, practices were held off-campus.
Ibla Vadasz ’28, a saber athlete who went 3-0 in the Bears’ matchup with Cornell, told The Herald that having weapons-specific coaches gave the team “an advantage in every squad” and the ability to “push past” previous boundaries.
Vadasz noted that the team went into their matchup with Cornell with a sense of high stakes, knowing that an upset victory could be in reach. Nonetheless, the team kept the composure needed to secure the win by a single bout.
Vadasz’s nail-biting 3-0 win over Cornell came down to a camera review during the final bout that ultimately fell to her favour. The two had been exchanging touches throughout the match, and it was the final camera-reviewed touch that swung the match in Bruno’s favor.
Kira Nguyen ’28, an epee athlete who won one of the final bouts over Cornell and secured a crucial point toward the team’s upset, said team morale was “unparalleled” over the weekend.
“After every match, no matter the score, we all hug each other, give high fives,” Ngyuen told The Herald. “We’re always there for each other, and wishing each other the best.”
Since members of the team had faced certain opponents before, they were able to offer guidance on how to handle each match, Nguyen explained. In one match against a Yale fencer, Nguyen attributed her success in countering and anticipating her foe to the collective gameplaning done by her and the rest of the team.
To address the nerves and morale elements of competing, Liu has implemented meditation and mindfulness into practices. She said that doubts “are just distractions,” adding that players “should only have to focus on the art of the sport itself.”
Vadasz, who finished thirteenth this year, finished the tournament second last year. “Mentally, I came in with a lot of pressure of wanting to perform at the same level that I did last year, and that really got to my head,” she said.
Apart from their win against Cornell, the Bears lost a competitive matchup against Penn, who they defeated last year.
Following the loss, the team “had a little bit of an emotional bonding moment where we realized this was our seniors’ last Ivies, and we still were reminded of the fact that we beat Cornell,” Vadasz said.
The Bears were further outmatched by their other Ivy foes, losing to Princeton 21-6, Columbia 24-3 and Yale 20-7.
As Liu’s first season coaching the Bears nears its conclusion, she hopes her and the assistant coaches’ presence allows athletes to “continue striving for a higher and higher potential that maybe they otherwise would not have thought they could achieve without a proper coaching staff.”
The team is now looking forward to competing at the Northeast Fencing Conference Championships at Boston College later this month.
Chiupong Huang is a senior staff writer covering sports.
