Fencing Falls Short In Repeat Title Bid

A championship repeat was just not in the cards.

The Harvard fencing team entered the season as the unquestioned defending national champion, but came away with a sixth-place finish at the year-end NCAA Championships in Madison, N.J. this weekend. Senior captain Tim Hagamen led seven All-Americans for the Crimson with an individual title in the sabre.

The finish is the second best in school history after last year’s national championship season.

After regional competition, Harvard qualified just nine fencers for nationals, a number mathematically insufficient to allow the team to repeat. But two at-large bids later the Crimson looked to have a shot at the nation’s strongest 12-person teams—Penn State, St. John’s, and Columbia.

The Nittany Lions’ 194 wins blew the competition away, easily surpassing second-place St. John’s (176). Columbia (169), Notre Dame (160), and Ohio State (144) rounded out the top five. Harvard finished sixth with with 123.

Hagamen locked up his first individual medal in New Jersey by winning 19 of 22 bouts, beating out the second and third-place finishers by just one victory.

The final bout could not have been closer. The Crimson’s captain beat out Notre Dame’s Patrick Ghattas, 15-14, to become just the fourth men’s fencer to win an individual medal in Harvard history and the first in the saber. Hagamen ends his Crimson career with three All-American finishes.

The other six All-Americans were senior foil Enoch Woodhouse and junior epee Teddy Sherrill on the men’s side, and epee fencers senior Jasmine McGlade and Maria Larsson, junior sabre Alexa Weingarden, and freshman foilist Misha Goldfeder for the women.

—Staff writer Madeleine I. Shapiro can be reached at mshapiro@fas.harvard.edu.