Nationals update

NO Saturday practice.  Things will get back to normal next week.

Everyone has been fencing pretty well.  No breakout performances, but everyone has been solid.

Kim Phillips was up first on Monday as part of a Vet sabre team.  They won their first match pretty easily.  A quick aside, these are called the Summer nationals, but not every event here is a National Championship.  At National Championships, everyone has to be a US citizen or a permanent resident.  At a NAC event (North American Cup), anyone can enter.  At NACs in individual events you often run into very good Canadian, Chinese, and other fencers who are in the US.  If they have fenced internationally there is a formula to convert an international ranking to an American one.  If they haven’t fenced internationally or in the US they get the standard Unrated classification.  There is a joke about having a Canadian U in your pool.  Anyway, the Vet sabre team is not a National Championship and the next team Kim’s team faced had an ex-Olympian from Russia and a former Olympic medalist from Belarus.  Didn’t go quite as well.  Kim’s team then won a fence off for the bronze medal.

Anyway, most of the events here are National Championships.  The National Championships for Cadet and Junior are the JOs in February.  The National Div I Championships are in April.

Up next was Nicole Milewski in the Cadet (13-16) women’s epee NAC event.  She had an excellent first round, going 5-1, and only losing to the number 5 fencer in the country for that age group.  She won her first DE, but lost the second, still ending up at 37th out of 187.

On Tuesday it was Robert Thomas fencing in the Vet 40-49 men’s epee.  Robert was “en fuego,” going 5-1.  He beat an A and a B fencer and only lost to the top seeded person in the event.  Unfortunately, his first DE was a fencer from his pool who changed up his defense and got revenge.  Robert still finished 17th out of 38.

Wednesday was the busy day.  Robert was not quite as on as Tuesday but was still solid in the Div II epee.  His pool was 2-4, but that was three 4-5 and one 3-5 loss.  That got him one of the young whippersnapper types.  Robert kept it close, losing 11-15.  He finished 169/239.

Erica Julien was up in women’s sabre.  It took her a while to get into sabre mode.  She was 1-7 in the pool, but improved as the day went on.  She won her first DE handily and then pushed the woman who ended up finishing second with a 7-10 score.  That got her the 8th place medal.

Nicole finished the day with the Y-14 epee event.  She had another good pool, again 5-1.  Her one loss was to the woman who won the 1-A Championship earlier in the week.  She lost another close 11-15 DE to finish 72/201.

 

The events at these type of tournaments often get weird and crazy.  Nicole lost to a fencer rated about 40 places below her.  However, the woman in Nicole’s pool who won the second highest rated type of tournament a few days earlier and came out of the pools rated 13th, plus the 2nd and 7th seeds, all lost their first DEs to people seeded in the 130s and 140s.  A woman who came in 2nd in the Div 1 (highest level) Championship, didn’t make the top 16 in this one.  In this type of event, it can be all about the match up of who you get in the DEs.  Plus it shows how strong these tournaments are.  It used to be that most pools would have a “bunny.”  That was someone who qualified from Outer Podunk and had never done anything like this ever before.  Everyone in the pool would then destroy that person.  I haven’t seen any bunnies.  Everyone here knows how to fence although they may not be as experienced or gifted as the other fencers.