Fencing club celebrates 100-year anniversary

One hundred years ago, actor Douglas Fairbanks and the president of USC played a fencing match against each other. As they traded jabs and conversation across the piste, Fairbanks advocated for the school to begin offering film classes — now, in the middle of the top-ranked School of Cinematic Arts, there stands a statue of Fairbanks holding a screenplay in one hand, and a blade in the other.

This November, the USC Fencing Club celebrated its 100-year anniversary on campus, with team members and coaches alike reflecting on their storied history — including sending multiple athletes to compete in the Olympics, bringing together now-married couples and contributing to the beginning of the film school.

The club has accepted both beginning fencers and longtime champions alike to the Physical Education building on Tuesday and Thursday nights for practice, with its coaches and alumni hanging new stories and accomplishments on the club’s legacy throughout the years. Club alumna Janice Lee York Romary competed in more Olympics than any other Trojan; and Helene Mayer, another club Olympian who won gold in the 1928 and silver in 1936, was pressured into fencing for Nazi Germany as a Jewish woman to keep her family safe during World War II. 

Today’s head coach is Scott Frank, an alumnus whose tenure at USC fencing has lasted since 1998. In an interview with the Daily Trojan, Frank reflected on his long experience at the club.

“Coaching is not just about knowing the sport more than anybody else. It’s about making sure everybody there can learn at their own pace and get something out of it,” Frank said. “It’s about making sure everybody there feels fulfilled [by] coming every night.”

The late-night practices involve various activities, including drilling and free fencing matches between team members. The club uses all three different fencing weapons: the epée, where the entire body is the target to score a point; the sabre, where most of the upper body is the target; and the foil, where only the torso is the target. 

According to club president Jude Sorkin, a junior majoring in aerospace engineering, the members are close with each other and are always enthusiastic when showing up to practice, regardless of how much experience they have — or the time of the night.

“It feels a lot like a team, which is nice to see,” Sorkin said. “[At] just about every practice, we end at midnight, but a lot of times we’ll stand outside talking until about 1 a.m.”

Uniting athletes just starting out in the sport as well as lifetime fencers has proven to be a valuable element to the members of the club, including Matt Blanco, a sophomore majoring in biomedical engineering who had been fencing for eight years before joining the club last year. He said that fighting one-on-one matches each night at practice allows people to know what techniques they need to work on or build off of, calling the environment “very collaborative.”

“Our camaraderie is comparable to any NCAA team … we support each other, we grow with each other,” Blanco said. “I share my own experiences with fencing to my teammates, and they do the same to me. It’s a lot of team building and a lot of self-growth.”

That spirit of closeness brought some USC fencing athletes together for the long-term as well — Frank knows of at least three couples in the last 15 years who have gotten married from meeting at the club, one of which asked him to officiate their wedding.

“It’s just incredible to see thousands of people pass through your door and learn something, and they always remember 20 [or] 30 years later that they took that fencing class back in college,” Frank said. “It’s something you just remember forever, because you got to have fun and run around with the sword — and smack people.”