Women's Fencing Foils All Opponents

Curses. 'Foiled' again."

And this time, that's what every-body else said.

For the first time in the history of Harvard's fencing program, the women placed first in the team competition at the NCAA Northeast Regional Qualifier held Saturday at Brooklyn College.

But they were just beginning.

On Sunday, Harvard sent four representatives to the individual competition and left with first, second and fifth. Senior co-captain Mayling Birney won the event, freshman Viktoria Danics placed second, and senior co-captain Kristen Hughes finished fifth.

In the team competition, the women were seeded second on the strength of their regular season 9-3 (3-1 Ivy) mark heading into the regionals. After advancing through the first two rounds, Harvard faced St. John's for the regional title.

Having lost their only regular season meeting on touches, the women avenged their loss with a 9-6 victory to take the crown.

"That felt really good," Hughes said. "It's nice to come back and beat them after they beat us during the season. We knew we would probably have to face St. John's in the finals and we knew what we had to do to beat them. We had enough stamina to do it."

Before meeting St. John's, the Crimson moved through the semifinals by knocking out Yale, 9-4. In the first round, Harvard advanced out of its three-team pool by defeating New York University, 9-3, and followed that up with a 9-4 win over Brandeis.

With their win in the regionals, Harvard qualified for the NCAA's and will be a high seed when it begins the 12-team competition at Brandeis March 18-22. With the Northeast also sending St. John's, Yale and Brandeis (two through four in the regionals) to the nationals, Harvard has an edge on the competition.

"We're really excited to be in the NCAA's," Hughes said. "We know we can beat three teams that there. We're going to take it easy for a couple of days and get back to a lot of bouting.

"We're facing strong teams, so we have to focus on bout techniques," she said. "We're going to have to be prepared to fence teams we don't usually face but which we know are traditionally strong, like Stanford and Penn State."

In individual competition, Harvard dominated the tournament. Following tournament rules, the 24 individual qualifiers were divided into four pools for the first round with the top three advancing from each pool.

The field was narrowed again after the semifinals when the top three fencers from each of the remaining two pools moved on to the final pool.

Birney led the way for the Crimson, going 11-4, while Danics finished with of record of 10-5, but not without a dramatic finish.

Both finished the pool with 10-4 marks but since the individual title cannot be awarded on touches according to tournament rules, they had to fence a final bout to determine the winner before Birney came out on top to take the individual crown for the first time.

"We were all cheering for Harvard," Hughes said. "It was a fantastic weekend. We performed better than we had in the past."

No less impressive was Hughes performance. Fencing from the second alternate spot, she ended with a mark of 7-7.

"I wasn't fencing as well as I should have been [during the season]," Hughes said. "I finally pulled my act together."

Sara Crasson, Harvard's fourth representative, entered the individual competition suffering from a wrist injury which she aggravated in the team competition on Saturday and was knocked out in the first round with a 2-3 mark.

With their finishes, Birney and Danics have guaranteed themselves two of the seven spots allotted to the northeast region in the 24-seed individual competition. This will be Birney's third appearance at the nationals, after finishing 20th in 1992 and 24th in 1993.

Since regional results and season record determine individual berths, Hughes finish in the regionals put her in contention for one of the other five spots.

Crasson's season record may also be enough to earn her a berth in the individual tournament.

"I think we were really intense going in," Hughes said. "We were all fencing very well and we had great results.

"To do that, we all had to be fencing very well. It was a strong performance for the whole team, and we're very pleased with the effort."