En garde, salut, touché

On Tuesday nights, the gym in the Heath Education Building is filled with the clanging, ringing, clash of sword on sword as the University of Toledo Fencing Club holds its weekly practice.

About 15 people practice fencing techniques with the group, one of UT's many sports clubs.

"We started it last year," said Alex Fisher, a senior majoring in anthropology and president of the club. He said that the club has been practicing together since November 2009. "We're trying to establish a club that started my freshman year; the year before maybe."

Members of the club use three styles of sword: the epee, which is the heaviest; the saber, used for both stabbing and slashing moves; and the foil, which is lighter than the other swords.

"We're going to get to some tournaments," Fisher said. "We should be able to have an epee team and a foil team by then."

Though the club has practiced together for almost a year, Fisher said they are still working to become an established fencing group.

"We're still trying to build our armory, so we still need a bunch of swords and a bunch of other equipment to be able to go to these tournaments," he said.

Several pieces of equipment are used in the sport of fencing; from a jacket and mask to the three styles of blade used in the sport.

Each type of sword is governed by different rules during a tournament that can limit a fencer in different ways.

"There aren't as many rules with epee as there are the foil," Fisher said. "Epee's easier to just do. Foil's got rules that you have to worry about, and saber has rules, too."

The rules of the epee are the least restrictive, allowing fencers to score points on any hit. The saber allows for hits anywhere on the upper body except the hands, while the rules of the foil restrict point-scoring hits to the torso.

Other rules for the foil and saber are about movement. "You don't have the rules of right of way [in epee], so if you hit you get a point, whereas with foil if you hit, you might get a point," Fisher said. "It depends on who had priority because their arm was extended or they parried your blade or they did this or they did that."

UT Fencing also practices with the fencing club at Bowling Green State University.

"It's a lot like ours, only they're better equipped because they used to have a team, and then it became a class, and then it went away," Fisher said. "They still have a whole bunch of equipment and they're established."

According to Fisher, fencing is a sport that must be learned from someone with prior experience.

"It's really hard to do with one person, and even if you just have two people starting out, unless you get direction from someone that's more experienced than you, you're not really going to grow as well as you should," Fisher said. "You will always stay at a very beginner level."

Some members of the club, including Fisher, began fencing in high school. Others, like Johnathan Allen, did not fence before joining UT Fencing.

Allen, a freshman at Owens Community College, first heard of the club through a friend at UT "right when this club started."

While fencing can be fun because "we get to play with swords," Allen said, there are many other benefits to picking up fencing as both a sport and a hobby.

"It's a good workout, for one, versus going to the gym or something, in my opinion," Allen said. "It's very aerobic."

Fisher said that fencing matches, though intense, are very short. An average match lasts around three minutes, but may go on for a maximum of nine minutes with two one-minute breaks between.

The physical aspect, however, is not the only challenging part of fencing.

"It's also a very mental game," Allen said. "It's about 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical. It's trying to figure out what your opponent is going to do, then circumventing it to get the point."

— UT Fencing meets from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday nights at the Health Education Building gym. To find out more, contact the club at fencing.utoledo@gmail.com.