Hell Hath No Greater Fury than Women with Swords

At this point in time I must report on a very exciting day for the Bryn Mawr fencing team. Go Vixens! We had a team tournament with Temple and Princeton at Princeton University this past Sunday. First of all, it began at a respectable hour of the day. For some reason most people think it's a good idea for people to start swinging swords around and attempting to stab each other at the ass crack of dawn. Meaning, we pile into the van before it's even light out. Luckily we didn't have to be on the road until 10am. The day started off on the wrong foot, when it turned out that Princeton had sent us directions that were completely wrong! Since I was one of the drivers, I was not a happy camper. I feel bad for the team in retrospect, but luckily I kept it to a couple of snappish comments until after warming up, because I was pissed off, hungry, tired, and about to keel over. A chocolate chip cookie and a bottle of water later, I was doing ok. We got the team checked in, and we were ready to fence.

I was fencing foil, so we would have a full team. (There are only two full time foilists on our team.) Our sabre team had been dropping like flies due to illness, so we only had two of them. However, sabre was being fenced as an individual event, because Princeton didn't have any saberists. Epee was also an individual event for our three, because Princeton only had one of those. Foil was the only team event. Princeton had eleven foilists, nine of whom were fencing that day. Therefore the teams for the event were: Bryn Mawr, Temple, Princeton A, Princeton B and Princeton C.

I wish I had been able to see what had been going on with epee and sabre more, but unfortunately those events were going on across the room. Our saberists, Michelle and Annalee did extremely well. Annalee had an awesome DE (direct elimination bout), and was extremely close to medaling by a couple of points. Our epeeists, Courtney, Jeanette and Travis also did extremely well, and Jeanette did bring home the bronze medal.

Foil was fenced in a team of three - A: Me, B: Rachel and C: Lydia. We were matched up with the A, B and C fencers of the other teams in order to fence a round of pools. Everyone did really well. We went on to team direct elimination and began by fencing Princeton C, one of the first teams we faced in pools. Victory for Bryn Mawr! We won this round and moved on to the next to fence Princeton A. My favorite bout of the day had been with the A fencer from this team. He had been wiping the floor with people all day, so I had no great expectations for this bout in terms of score. However, I was not going down without a fight. As Rachel put it later, I basically went sabre on his ass. I wanted to have some fun with this so I went into full attack mode purely for the hell of it. He ran. Almost off the end of the strip. I ended up losing anyway, but it was 5-4 and had been tied up for a while. We lost our second DE, but not by a lot, and ended with a decent 4th place finish. Best part of the day? The looks on Princeton's faces when we started coming back like crazy. That's right guys! We may be smaller than you, but we are vicious! :)

Final tally in the fencing journal:

Victories - 8, Defeats - 4, Touches Scored - 53, Touches Received - 37, Indicator - +16

Overall, a decent day of fencing that was incredibly fun!!!