AOTW: Ungar's Gold Helps Harvard Take Title

History was made this weekend, as an outsider fencing team from a college focused on academics and offering no perks for its athletes beat all comers to take first place in the NCAA National Fencing Championships.

That college was Harvard, and sophomore Benji Ungar was at the heart of the victory.

Ungar’s gold individual win in epee helped the Crimson build an unassailable position by Sunday afternoon’s bouts that even the usual suspects in the winner’s line-up—Penn State, Ohio State, and Notre Dame—were not able to demolish.

“It’s pretty gratifying because everyone has a lot of other commitments here [at Harvard],” Ungar said yesterday.

“It’s still hard to believe we actually pulled it out...It was very high-energy and exciting as we kept going and going, getting higher and higher.”

After going 18-5 in the epee round-robin, Ungar swept through his semifinal bout with a 15-4 win to advance to a tense final against Ohio State’s Denis Tolkachev.

Ungar eventually clinched the title with a 15-14 triumph, making him only the third Harvard men's fencer ever to win NCAA gold individually, and the first in 12 years. 

David Jakus, co-captain of the men’s team, said that Ungar had fenced “phenomenally” over the weekend.

“He had a tough first round, then he just turned it around,” Jakus said. “Particularly on the second day, he just stepped it up, even with the pressure mounting.”

“I’ve known Benji since we were 10 years old and I think he’s fenced this year better than I’ve ever seen him fence before, and I think he’d agree.”

The NCAA team championship is not only the first in the Crimson fencing program’s 118-year history, but also only the fourth NCAA championship that Harvard has ever won in any sport.

But, Ungar emphasized, although the Crimson’s success was made up of individual victories, it was nevertheless a team effort that relied on a concerted performance by everyone involved.

“As cheesy as it sounds, everyone contributed a lot, and we really couldn’t have done it numerically without everyone there,” he said, referring to the NCAA scoring system whereby a college’s overall score is made up of the combined scores of all its fencers.

Harvard qualified the full complement of 12 fencers this year, putting it in a position with the potential for success.

“It was an amazing competition—it was a lot of fun,” Jakus said. “It gave us a chance to show some of the schools there how we fence as a team, and hopefully now they realize we are a force to be reckoned with.”

As for the future, “there’s definitely nowhere to go higher than this, though there’s a very good chance we could repeat,” Ungar said. “We are losing a bunch of really good senior fencers so it will be tough, but we definitely have a shot [at repeating]—nothing can stop the bus.”

—Staff writer Alexandra C. Bell can be reached at acbell@fas.harvard.edu.