Bruno Muñoz-Oropeza Épée bout between a CRLS fencer and another fencer.
Buckingham Browne & Nichols men’s and women’s fencing teams took home silver medals at the state championship tournament Saturday while Cambridge Rindge and Latin School teams came in fifth and sixth.
“I think [the teams are] very happy with the result,” BB&N fencing head coach Matthew Zich said. “The whole team ended up contributing big matches and big wins throughout the day.”
CRLS hosted the tournament, held at War Memorial Recreation Center. The CRLS men’s team placed fifth, defeating Northampton High School 16-11, and the women’s team came in sixth place with a 14-13 loss to the Weston High School team.
Out of 16 public and private schools in Massachusetts in the fencing league, the top eight schools with the best records during the season faced off in separate men’s and women’s seeded brackets. Teams competed against one another in rounds of 27 bouts across three weapons: foil, épée and sabre. After three rounds of fencing, Concord-Carlisle men’s and Boston Latin School women’s teams took the state championship titles.
The CRLS teams lost their initial rounds against the Weston men and Concord-Carlisle women, but the bigger accomplishment was the improvement the entire squad saw over the season, head coach Gregory Berger said.
“We graduated a lot of very experienced fencers last year, and this is a relatively new team,” Berger said. “Having them go from the beginning of September to now, we qualify for a state championship, to me, it’s a major accomplishment, regardless of what they are going to place.”
The championship caps off the end of the competitive season and the end of several high school fencing careers. It was the last tournament for CRLS’s three captains, one for each weapon.
Bruno Muñoz-Oropeza CRLS fencers with assistant coach Angélica Brisk.
“It’s pretty crazy this is my last competition just because I’ve been doing it for so long,” sabre captain and senior Lee Van Voorhis said. “Fencing has been a big part of my life for a long time, and I really do think that I’ve gained a lot of friends from it, a community, and I’ve really liked learning how to do it.”
Van Voorhis won three of the four bouts they fenced for the women’s team. Épée captain and junior Gareth Flandro defeated a nationally seeded fencer during a quarter-final bout and both he and foil captain Finn Graham secured victories in the men’s bid for fifth place.
Graham, a senior and foil captain for three years, has played multiple sports, but found community in fencing he didn’t find in other athletics.
“It feels like, at least at our level, a pretty inclusive sport,” Graham said. “We have people with different backgrounds and all different skill levels and experience levels, and we all practice together.”
The state championship tournament was organized by CRLS fencing assistant coach Angélica Brisk and her husband, George Scott. Brisk and Scott are also founders of the high school fencing team, established in 2014.
This story is part of a partnership between Cambridge Day and the Boston University Department of Journalism.
