@bkhstips - I think it is important to understand that there is no one size fits all when it comes to fencing recruitment. Only recently above, both @helmut? and @Rollhigher, posted incredibly valuable detailed and clear guidelines for navigating this process. As a sophomore who is not currently a top recruit, it is probably bit early in the process. All the more reason to get one’s ducks in order, including standardized testing. Should your daughter not make significant gains on the junior points list, her B rating, strong GPA, and hopefully powerful standardized test scores may still get her into a DV1, certainly a DV3, program. She just may be more on the fringes for DV1, e.g., not one of the stronger fencing programs, and will almost certainly have to wait for a bit of trickle down after the top recruits commit. She will have a more ready chance at a top DV3. This is where perhaps the number one criterion, best school for your daughter, comes into strong play. If she loves a DV3 school, it is a place at which she will thrive and be happy, and all of the other factors line up, you may find yourself best served by targeting that school earliest and working towards that goal. We know a fencer very much aligned with your daughter – B rating, high UW GPA, great test scores, with no significant junior points standing. All this fencer wanted, however, was to go to Johns Hopkins. Rather than focus on moving up the junior points list, this fencer engaged the school early, using fencing as more of a bit of flash, and then connected with a variety of international community service programs related to a prospective major. You have some great factors on your side. My advice is to target the school(s) first, and then play the game to the best advantage of the strong cards already in your hand. Good luck!
@bkhstips you are more than welcomed. I would think you are a year away from fully diving into the recruiting process. The main thing now is to really focus on academics and preparing for the board exams. Your daughter has already achieved her B rating which is fantastic, one step away from an A, which depending on the schools your daughter has her sights set on could be helpful. Just a minor observation from my experience. I really don’t know how crucial this is. In my daughter’s weapon all the fencers that were recruited into the sought after programs were all A rated and top 8 in her age group. Not top 8 in the JNPR, but in her age group.
@SevenDad, @ShanFerg3 and @BrooklynRye: Appreciate all the guidance and suggestions so far. This is a great forum for newcomers like us that benefit from your experience. Thank you!
@bkhstips
My son’s experience did not differ much from what has already been posted. He did not fill out the questionnaires, except in the two cases where the coaches specifically asked him to do so.
It seemed that the coaches rely on the direct emails, But that the questionnaires are for administrative purposes.
I know this is a recruiting thread but would just like to add that even if you are not recruited there is a good chance you can Fence in college. My D17 is currently at a D1 school and competes at all their meets. She was incredibly strong as an academic candidate but did not Fence outside of her high school. Her freshman year she missed most of the season (due to hip surgery in August) but ended up at NCAA regionals. She Fences against some of the top programs. D did not get any interest from Fencing coaches during the recruiting process because she chose to be a multi sport athlete. I would say that if you are not recruited but really want to Fence in college that you should look at schools at a level where you can walk-on and be an impact player, it will be more fun and fulfilling.
This is really important, @cleoforshort . We, and this thread a bit, tend to become a bit preoccupied with DV1 programs. Elite recruits are in a very small minority of fencers. The large majority are kids who love the sport and go to tournaments, local, regional, and national, to do the best they can and, above all, to have fun! Whether it be a club team at a SUNY or at a more competitive school. A DV3 or a less competitive DV1. There are so many places to continue to enjoy the sport.
Just found out another fencer in my daughter’s weapon committed to an Ivy. That makes the top 9 girls coming out this year all successfully recruited to an Ivy program. I don’t know if that’s typical but pretty good year I would think.
While there are weaker recruiting classes for a given gender/weapon in every season, I think the recruiting results you cite are pretty typical. In my son’s recruitment year, the top 14 fencers in his weapon were recruited by: Columbia; Yale, Penn, Harvard, Notre Dame, Princeton, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and by NYU. Several of these schools obviously recruited more than one fencer. Filtering out non-Ivies, still more than half of these were recruited by Ivies. In the meantime, it is notable that a slew of fencers were recruited at non-Ivies, including at elite DV3 schools and so-called Big Box schools such as PSU and OSU. Many of these fencers have had tremendous success and certainly derived great benefit and joy from their NCAA fencing careers. Kudos to all of them!
So far this year no one in her weapon has committed to ND or the big box schools, Duke, Stanford, NYU, etc. Harvard didn’t recruit her weapon this year. It’s been all the other Ivies. It seems everyone kind of find their place. And, it’s possible to actually predict where each fencer is going to wind up. As oppose to feeling like one is in competition, it feels like the girls and families pull and are happy for one another. Fascinating process to watch unfold.
Hello everyone,
My daughter is a B2018 ranked sabre fencer, on cadet and junior national points list. Her fencing results are good, and constantly improving, but not spectacular. She is a good student in a very competitive large public suburban high school. Of course, she wants to be recruited by an Ivy to fence :). Please share your experience of how you got your children to evaluate colleges realistically. I don’t want her to set her sights on Harvard, and even if she is good enough academically, it’s still a lottery because there are so many talented applicants,and their fencing recruits are all top notch. I am reading through this discussion and it’s super helpful. Did you child know early what they want to study? My daughter doesn’t really know, and frankly, at 15, I can’t blame her. I had no clue what I wanted to study even after starting college. She is a sophomore right now, and didn’t take PSATs because PSATs happened the same weekend as the October NAC, and she wasn’t going to miss the October NAC. My goal for her is to find a college where she will be happy and she will get to fence because she loves it and it will keep her sane and give her a community of like-minded people. Olympics is not the goal here. 
Thanks for reading through this rant, fellow fencer and fencing parents!
Hello, Tigermaman, and welcome to the thread!
While to say, “No size fits all” may sound trite, it is a critical concept to accept when it comes to fencing recruitment, including one’s choice of school.
As a B-rated fencer, presumably not exceptionally high on the JWS national points list, your daughter’s chances of being recruited by a competitive Ivy League fencing program are slim. There are, of course, exceptions to this. If, for instance, your daughter is an exceptional academic candidate, there may be room as part of a package to recruit a much stronger fencer requiring some AI-balancing. But assuming no anomalies, her best shots at Ivy League fencing will be at Cornell, Yale or at Brown. These schools will give more weight to her ability to gain admission via her academics, and will be at least somewhat less concerned about her rating.
In targeting fencing programs, you must decide whether you want the most opportunities to compete or to be on the most competitive team. These do not always match. There are fencers who have no problem riding the bench at Notre Dame and basking in the glory of national championships. They often find themselves relegated to “practice dummy” status, and mop-up bouts at lesser tournaments or when nothing is particularly on the line, but relish being on a championship team.
One aspect of this is the size of the team/squads. A larger squad usually means that those lower on the depth chart stay home when the squad travels to NCAA tournaments. However, the larger squad provides more diverse practices with more opportunities for fencer development. It also provides leeway in cases of injury or when the top fencers may conflict-out with an international designated event. A smaller squad, while not providing the leeway or opportunities of the larger one, may provide more chances to fence, particularly in cases where the starters are injured or conflict-out.
You also have to target goals. If your daughter intends to continue to compete nationally, possibly internationally, and has longer term goals in the sport, then you may wish to be in a program that has flexibility to allow for outside training and competition, in a location that supplies resources to enable this.
Of course, no analysis of schools is near completion without what should be a primary focus on the academics. What does your child want to study? Prospective major(s)? Potential career paths? When our son was looking at schools, we had him go through the course booklets of several potential schools, blanking-out the name of the school that went with each booklet. This forced him to take a hard look at course offerings and how they worked with his potential major and career options, without being unduly biased by the name of the school.
Applying what I have written above to what you wrote, I sense a bit of potential conflict. Your daughter wants to be recruited and fence for an Ivy, but recognizes that, even if she can gain admission based on her academics, she will probably not get much fencing in at top programs. You want your daughter to be happy and to have the opportunity to fence. Limiting focus to Ivy League programs may provide neither of these. Even at the limited number that might recruit someone with her fencing stats, assuming powerful academics, she may still not be happy.
My advice (and there will be a TON of good advice forthcoming on this thread from some truly exceptional parents and fencers), is that you start with the school. Leave fencing to the side while you evaluate the best academic and social landing spots for your daughter. Once you have a list of schools that meet these critical needs, filter a bit based on their fencing programs. If your daughter loves the sport and wants to compete, she may be better off at an elite school with a less competitive fencing program. She may even be better off with a school that offers fencing at the club level which has its own hot regular season and championships. We know many, many fencers who have found tremendous satisfaction, on both the academic and fencing side, competing at superb schools such as Duke, Northwestern, Brandeis, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Wellesley, and many, many others.
Whatever you do, keep your daughter’s happiness front and center. She may not know what she wants to be when she grows up, but she will be more likely to find it in a nurturing environment, with good resources and opportunities, where she is comfortable and happy.
Hmm…not sure about recruiting at Cornell or Yale as a B rated fencer…if BrooklynRye could name one recently I would stand corrected. Walk on of course. Just past weekend’s NAC my daughter faced a highly ranked incredible fencer from Cornell, another A rated new recruit to Cornell medaled (beating 2 highly ranked fencers along the way), and another new recruit that I found out this weekend committed to Cornell is A rated. I don’t know much about Brown admittedly. My daughter is an A rated competitive fencer recruited by Yale and I know she would not have been recruited if she weren’t an A. BrooklynRye knows much more than I do admittedly. But, not sure if it’s sound advice thinking a B rating would give a shot at recruitment at the schools he listed. As a walk on, most certainly.
Hi BrooklynRye,
Super helpful, thank you! I love the idea of giving her course catalogs with the name of the college blanked out and have her evaluate colleges this way! I am struggling with getting her see past the names and thinking critically what she wants to get out of her college experience. She actually agrees with you about Brown, Yale and Cornell (she knows which girls got recruited where and what their results/ratings were at the time) and thinks that it’s not entirely hopeless with these three. I also think that she will not be happy if she doesn’t get to compete - so that’s one thing we will have to keep in mind when looking at colleges. We will definitely look at schools that compete at club levels - I personally think it will be a better option for her than being on a superb team but sitting out the competitions.
Glad to be of service. More to come I am sure. It is difficult to go back and filter out official recruits, versus walk-ons, at each school. The top recruits will usually be A-rated. However, we absolutely know of official recruits to each of the Ivies mentioned who were not A-rated. I don’t recall any C-rated recruits at these schools, but definitely B-rated ones. Your daughter apparently knows examples of the same circumstances. The reason for this is simple numbers. The most competitive recruits will generally (not always) default to the most competitive programs. This leaves less competitive programs with less choices to fill their recruiting needs. If it is a choice between a B-rated fencer or being undermanned (or under-womanned) in a particular weapon, I am quite sure fielding a complete squad will win out. Also, whereas there are NCAA statistical reasons for coveting A-rated fencers, and perhaps some probability of greater skill denoted by a top rating, this is hardly 100%. There are some very, very skilled and tough fencers with ratings lower than an A. In particular, always keep in mind that, for the most part, NCAA fencing is about 5-touch bouts. Some of the best fencers in the country are not particularly solid pool fencers. A sizable number of fencers who never make the podium at a national event, crush it regularly in pools. The blind course catalog exercise was eye-opening!
tigermaman your daughter is 15 so she has plenty of time to work on her rating and put herself in a more favorable recruiting position. I think it’s a disservice to allow you to believe you are set at any of those Div 1 Ivies with a B rating. My daughter didn’t have a B, and I don’t believe anyone else on this thread could tell you their child was recruited at an Ivy with a B rating. There will be walk ons and maybe this is what your daughter sees, and believes since they’re on the team they were recruited. You’re daughter is one great tournament away from achieving an A. Doesn’t have to be a national. It can be a well attended regional. That would be my small input from my experience in my daughter’s weapon. Not one single B fencer has been recruited at any of those schools. Maybe it’s different for Sabre.
In my opinion, from experience in my daughter’s weapon, if you have designs at being recruited at one of those schools you would probably have to be top 10 that year in your weapon. I did hear that it’s more difficult to find Sabre fencers with the grades to get recruited at these schools, so maybe it’s different for your daughter’s weapon, if in fact this is true.
Okay, the competitive, self-congratulatory posts that mistake singular experience and anecdotal trivia as universal truths are myopic at best. @ShanFerg3 Please take note the OP called out BrooklynRye in post 892 – not you. It seems you missed the subtlety there.
Self congratulatory post? I think you are confused. I said specifically this is my input from my experience and noted hers could be different.
tigermaman:
I’d suggest imagining college fencing recruiting as a Venn diagram where you are trying to find the shaded area amongst 4 circles representing in no particular order: a) fencing performance, b) academic performance, c) student’s interests, d) college costs.
RE: Fencing performance. It seems the coaches predominantly focus on the junior national rolling points ranking when they recruit. I wouldn’t worry about the letter classification. And short of making the US Cadet team, I don’t think that Cadet ranking means as much as JNRP ranking. From year to year the number of recruited fencers will change both for the class and for each college. The rule of thumb that a fencer in the top 8-10 in their class, weapon, and gender will get a good look from the most competitive colleges seemed to hold true for my son’s year and weapon. Of course, depending on the year, weapon, gender, and college the necessary ranking to be recruited can go deeper onto the list. The VitalStats document from FencingParents referred to elsewhere in the thread gives a range for where current college fencers ranked when they were recruited. I would look at junior year post-JO or post-national Championships ranking, as that is when the most competitive programs (i.e., Ivy’s, ND) recruit.
RE: Academic performance. The expectation of recruited fencers will depend on the college. Rumor has it that some schools, including Stanford, Yale, Brown, expect fencers to have the same scores and GPAs as the general student body in order to be recruited. Other competitive schools, including Princeton, Columbia, Penn appear to have more flexibility but still require extremely strong academic performance for a fencer to be recruited. As has been repeated many times in this thread, absence of sufficient demonstrated level of academic performance can limit which colleges a fencer can even consider being recruited to.
RE: Student’s interest. Which schools are the student interested in. Unless a fencer is the number one fencer in their grade (and probably even if they are) they should have a list of at least one school, but their list should not have colleges that they would not be interested in attending. There are many other places in this thread and elsewhere that discuss how to evaluate colleges for student interest, so I won’t.
RE: College costs. In this era where the value of college is much debated I would be remiss in not listing this as one of the circles in the Venn diagram. Given how much it can cost to be a competitive junior fencer, many fencer’s families may be fortunate enough not to worry about the costs of college. However, the potential $200,000 difference over four years between the full costs of an Ivy or other private college and a state school close to home is nothing to scoff at. Although fencing is not a head count sport, non-Ivy Div 1 colleges can offer athletic scholarships that could cover anywhere from just textbooks to tuition, room, and board (although the later is uncommon in fencing). Of course, academic merit and income-based financial aid may also be available depending on circumstances.
There might be value in understanding how each of these 4 components apply to your daughter and family, and then thinking about the possibility of fencing recruitment through this lense. I believe that successful recruitment occurs if and when, and only if and when, there is overlap between these 4 circles.
To answer your specific questions:
RE: share your experience of how you got your children to evaluate colleges realistically.
My son more or less used the Venn diagram outlined above.
RE: Did you child know early what they want to study?
He still has no idea, but his list of colleges of interest were all liberal arts colleges that pride themselves in providing students the opportunity to explore, discover, and grow.
RE: She is a sophomore right now, and didn’t take PSATs because PSATs happened the same weekend as the October NAC, and she wasn’t going to miss the October NAC.
I wouldn’t worry about PSATs. Lots of ways to practice for both the NMSQT and SATs. Indeed, if she ends up going down the ACT path, then she may never take an SAT-like test. As I indicated in my first post, we would recommend taking the SAT (or ACT) prior to Junior year as this will both given indication of what colleges are more possible and let the coaches know whether the candidate likely has sufficient academic performance.
RE: My goal for her is to find a college where she will be happy and she will get to fence because she loves it and it will keep her sane and give her a community of like-minded people.
There are enough colleges and good colleges with NCAA fencing programs that I’ve come to believe that a kid that wants to fence in college will be able to do so and get a great education.
Good luck!
Shanferg and Brooklyn Rye: It seems that of the men’s foilists that are seniors currently and were ranked in the top 10 on the Junior points list after last year’s JOs, 7 will likely attend an Ivy, 2 Duke, and 1 ND.