Thank you for your interest in our sport and our club.

Some of you may be looking for an afternoon activity that fits with other seasonal sports. Our hope is that you become so interested that fencing becomes your primary sport. That is definitely our goal.

Others of you may already be looking for a sport that you can do for years at an increasing skill level. A large percentage of our fencers continue to fence in college and receive athletic scholarships, a clear indicator of their abilities.

We welcome you both to our sport and our organization and hope you will be excited by your time here.

Getting Started

There is the perception that fencing is hard, that it takes talent, and that early success is required for long-term success in the sport. Not so!

NCF has had over 775 national finalists. That means one of our athletes finished first to eighth in a national championship or a national circuit event in a particular event based on weapon, gender, age, or skill. We are pretty sure we know what it takes to create a successful fencer. It has little to do with talent or beginning success and everything to do with just practicing more than others.

Fencing draws on lots of different skills. Some people find them easy to learn and experience a sudden skill improvement compared to another that is struggling. It is always in our experience that practice will get the athlete through the problem and that the earlier successful one will then get burdened down.

Here is a good example. We had two boys join about the same time. One was two years older that the other. After about two years of training, the younger one began to consistently defeat the older one, every time, every day, every competition. The older one even quit for a week before he realized he was being silly. Then within one week, they exchanged roles and the older one began to win all the time. Between them they have a huge number of national medals. They are four times this country's gold medalists in Junior or Senior men's epee. Both earned athletic scholarships to college. Both are NCAA Champions. The younger one is a world champion in junior team men's foil. The older one missed being in the top 32 fencers in the world to make the 2008 Olympics and is now in New York training for the 2012 Olympics.

 

See...it's just practice.