Fencers take trip to Cleveland tourney

The Oberlin fencing club clubbed its way through its first ever team competition for a marathon six hours.

Oberlin fencers traveled to the Cleveland John F. Kennedy Center to compete with five other clubs. Oberlin's Team A placed fourth and Team B placed last.

"Team fencing is really difficult. It's a lot more fencing than you really want to do in one day, but it's a good experience. Individual is a lot less nerve-racking," junior Andreas Orphanides said. Each team fenced for more than six hours during the course of the day.

Team fencing is scored differently than individual fencing. In a team competition, a team of three fencers duels another team of three fencers for a total of nine bouts. The score is a cumulative 45 points, composed of nine five-point bouts instead of the five and ten point bouts of the individual competition.

"An example of the system would be as follows: Team Oberlin is fencing Team On-Target. Alex Oberlin loses his bout to Bobby On-Target 3-5. When the next bout begins between Billy Oberlin and Cassius On-Target, they will fence to ten. This means that although Billy has to score seven points instead of five, he still has the opportunity to take the lead for his team," senior Gavin Malcolm said.

According to Malcolm, this was the first team competition the club has participated in. "This was an important step in our history," Malcolm said.

Oberlin's A Team consisted of Malcolm, senior Andy Murphy and sophomore Adam Smith. They won one bout 45-37. Oberlin's B team consisted of first-year Jaime Burns-France, senior Ben Hellerstein, first-year Gabriel Horan and Orphanides.

Although they lost all of their bouts, the B team still enjoyed the competition. "They were all fencers way out of our league, so I didn't feel bad about it," Burns-France said.