Badger Earns Lone Medal at Fencing NCAA's

It was the lone medal in the Lone Star State for sophomore Peregrine Badger in San Antonio, Tex., at the NCAA Fencing Championships this weekend.

The Crimson, which qualified 11 out of a possible 12 athletes for the tournament, placed sixth in a field of 25 schools. Princeton topped the competition for first overall and was trailed by Notre Dame, Penn State, Ohio State and St. John’s.

Badger, competing in the men’s epee, was the top finishing fencer for Harvard. The sophomore, improving on his sixth place finish last year, moved up from second to first team All-American honors.

“The bouts that I lost really motivated me to fight really hard over the next match-ups,” Badger said. “That kind of kept me going through the game. I was completely exhausted by the end.”

Badger picked up seventeen wins through his 23 qualifying bouts and tallied a total 101 touches for a positive indicator of 27. He entered the semi-finals as the top seed and faced Marco Canevari of Ohio State..

“Peregrine is one of those individuals with a terrific amount of talent,” Harvard coach Peter Brand said. “He has performed erratically during the year so to some extent his performance today was really actually pretty much what I expected.”

Canevari, the 2012 bronze medalist, took a commanding lead, 10-6, with time ticking away.

“I think Marco was especially playing one tactic over and over again,” Badger said. “I was experimenting with solutions throughout the bout and it was only at the end that I really figured out some satisfactory ways to deal with what he was doing.”

Despite falling behind, Badger began a comeback in the final seconds of the contest. While Badger came within one, it was too late as the Buckeye nabbed the win as the clock ran out, securing a spot in the finals.

“Time was running out and I figured out one of the solutions really fast and had to get it done,” Badger said, “I was really proud of that because oftentimes you open with one tactic and your opponent figures it out and you have to change tactics. I got three points in a row and then he finally changed tactics.”

Canevari would go on to claim the gold medal and national title.

Foil provided two more top ten finishes for Harvard. Sophomore Brian Kaneshige and freshman Michael Woo finished seventh and eighth, respectively. Kaneshige won 15 qualifying bouts while Woo collected 14. The pair were both named second-team All Americans.

Just outside of the top ten was junior Michael Raynis in the epee, who garnered an All-American Honorable Mention with 13 wins.

The Crimson struggled to find success in the saber. Junior Eric Arzoian won nine bouts with an indicator of negative eight for fifteenth place. Sophomore Alexander Ryjik finished six places behind, with just seven wins.

On the women’s side, junior Alexandra Kiefer led the effort for the Crimson with fifteen wins in the foil. Kiefer, who finished just outside of medal contention, was 11th at last year’s competition after capturing the title as a freshman.

“She felt, and I agreed, that she was a lot looser the second year after winning the NCAA Championships because you’ll always have a tremendous amount of pressure to perform,” Brand said. “This year she felt a lot better and there was no pressure.”

Kiefer’s younger sister, Lee Kiefer, a freshman at Notre Dame, won the foil event. The younger Kiefer dropped just one bout of her 23 qualifying matches, the contest with her sister.

Freshman Nina van Loon was the next top fencer for the Crimson. Van Loon came out with an indicator of four over her 12 wins for eleventh place. Teammate Emma Vaggo was close behind in fourteenth with 10 victories.

In the saber, first-year Aliya Itzkowitz picked up a twelfth place finish with 11 winning bouts and a positive indicator of three. Sophomore Kara Lee was three behind in fifteenth with 11 wins as well, yet had a negative indicator of nine to push her back in the standings.

“Overall it shows that we have very strong fencers on this team,” Brand said. “We have something we can build on next year when we’ll have a couple of very good fencers coming in. I’m very hopeful that we’ll do better next year.”

—Staff writer Cordelia F. Mendez can be reached at cordeliamendez@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter at @CrimsonCordelia.