Women's Fencing Finishes Third in Ivy Round-Robins

During the weekend’s Ivy Round Robin championships, the Harvard women’s fencing team went 4-2, finishing in third place. At the championships, held at Harvard’s Gordon Indoor Track, the team won two of three matches both days. Princeton walked away with the title, going 6-0 and defeating Harvard, 19-8. Senior fencer Felicia Sun led the team in winning the epee event against the Tigers, 5-4, but the Crimson lost the saber and foil events decisively, 8-1 and 7-2, respectively.

“Our biggest rivals this weekend were definitely Columbia and Princeton,” Sun said. “All three of us had really amazing bouts against [Princeton fencer] Cat Bolen. She’s on the world team and she’s pretty frightening, but we all fenced [well] against her. I think that really shifted the Princeton team’s confidence and I think that’s what enabled us to come out on top.”

Sun went 9-5 on the weekend, garnering an All-Ancient Eight second-team nod in the process. She was joined by women’s sabreur freshman Aliya Itzkowitz, while sophomore Emma Vaggo earned a place on the first-team all-conference squad by going 16-2 on the weekend.

Sun said that it was key in the team’s performance that it knew who it was going to play. According to Sun, the familiarity that she had with her opponents was very important in helping the team prepare and shift its lineup to gain advantageous matchups.

“I think our biggest strength is probably knowing what the matchups would be,” Sun said. “The people in the Ivy League are the people who are in the top tier in the nation, so I feel like many of us have either fenced them before or grown up fencing them all our lives. So what we were able to do was deliberately put people in that we thought would be good matches against certain fencers because we know their style.”

The Crimson, which ranks eighth in the nation, bracketed the loss to Princeton on Sunady with victories against Brown (17-10) and Penn (16-11). Vaggo said that the ability of the team to support each other was key.

“I think we knew that it was going to be hard coming in,” Vaggo said. “I think we did well overall but we had some really close bouts that didn’t go our way. This weekend I think we worked really well together as a team supporting each other.”

Vaggo also said that she was proud of the play of Itzkowitz and classmate Nina van Loon and that her performances were crucial in the team’s third-place finish.

“We had two freshmen do really well this weekend, Aliya Itzkowitz and Nina van Loon,” Vaggo said. “They did a good job. They dealt with a lot of pressure with their first Ivies, but I think they did a great job and really helped the team.”

Sun said that one of the challenges with the weekend was the lack of participation by the community in coming to the meet. Sun said that she often draws on energy from the crowd and was disappointed with the turnout.

“One thing that could have been better is getting support from our friends, from the men’s team and coaches,” Sun said. “It felt like during the whole meet there [weren’t] really a lot of people. We had really close matches against Princeton and Columbia, and I feel like if we had a little more support then people would have been able to put in a lot more of their energy.”

The tournament served as a warm-up for the regional tournament next Sunday, held in New York at St. John’s University.

“Regionals is a tricky event because only two people per squad qualify for the NCAA’s and since Regionals is the NCAA qualifier, it’s really going to test our team’s strength,” Sun said. “It will be hard for our team unity because we are competing against each other but we also need to help each other. We want to be able to send two people per squad, but we’re really going to have to work a lot on mental toughness…knowing what to draw, what to fight for to perform at the same level as we practiced.”

—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at davidfreed@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @CrimsonDPFreed.