Women's Fencing
- Title:
- Head Coach
- Email:
- zdudas@princeton.edu
- Alma Mater:
- Juhasz Gyula '92
Zoltan Dudas is in his 20th year as head coach of the Princeton men's and women's fencing teams in 2025-26. In every possible year during his Princeton career, Princeton has earned a top-10 finish at the NCAA Championship, and from 2011-17, Princeton was the only school in the nation to post a top-four finish in each of those years. Through 2025, Princeton has finished in the top four at the NCAA Championships in 11 of the 13 NCAAs in which it participated.
Princeton's climb to the top of the NCAA standings had the Tigers in 10th place in 2007 and in 2008, his first two seasons as head coach, followed by an eighth-place finish in 2009, a sixth-place finish in 2010, a fourth-place standing in 2011, runner-up in 2012 and finally the pinnacle in 2013 with the program's first joint NCAA men's/women's championship. The finish helped earn Dudas the 2013 U.S. Fencing Coaches Association Collegiate Varsity Fencing Coach of the Year honors. As an encore, Princeton finished runner-up in 2014 to stand as the only school to finish in the top two every year from 2012-14.
Under Dudas, Princeton took the maximum 12 NCAA Championship qualifications every year from 2010-14, returned to all-12 status in 2016 and did so again in every year Princeton competed from 2020-23. The 2020 NCAAs were canceled by the NCAA due to the COVID-19 virus, and the Ivy League did not compete during the 2021 season.
During the 17 seasons when NCAA Championships were held and Princeton competed during his time at Princeton, Dudas has led Tiger fencers to 128 All-America accolades out of 187 NCAA selectees with a high of 11 of a possible 12 accolades at the 2023 NCAA finals (excluding 2020, when All-Americans were selected following the cancelation of the NCAA Championships). When Dudas took over the Princeton program before the 2006-07 season, Princeton had not had an NCAA individual champion since 2001. Since his arrival, the program has had seven, with Jonathan Yergler '13 winning the NCAA epee title in 2012, Eliza Stone '13 becoming Princeton's first women's saber title winner in 2013 and Anna Van Brummen '17 becoming Princeton's first women's épée title winner in 2017. In 2018, for the first time in program history, Princeton had two individual champions in the same year, in épée champion Kasia Nixon and saber champion Maia Chamberlain, and in 2022, Maia Weintraub became the program's first NCAA foil champion under Dudas. Tristan Szapary became the most recent in 2024, winning the men's épée title.Under Dudas, Princeton's women won five straight Ivy League titles from 2010-14 and returned to the top in 2016, 2017, 2022, 2023 and 2024, and the men's team captured the crown in 2010, 2012, 2016, 2017, 2024 and 2025. The women's team won 32 Ivy League matches in a row from 2009-15 and won 52 straight matches overall from 2013-15. Dudas also shared the Ivy League's inaugural Coach of the Year award for women's fencing in 2015 and earned the honor again in 2016, 2017, 2022 and 2023 before adding the men's honor in 2025.
Overall, Dudas has a 360-110 dual-meet record with the men's team and a 415-94 record with the women. Both programs have set wins records under Dudas, with the Princeton women's 14 winningest seasons all-time coming during his tenure and the Princeton men's 16 winningest years all-time coming over the last 15 seasons. In 2013-14, the Princeton women set a program wins record and posted the program's first undefeated season by going 31-0 in dual meets. The women's team went unbeaten again in 2021-22 at 30-0. The 2023-24 season saw the men's team set a program record with 27 wins.
At the Olympic level, Dudas served as a U.S. épée coach during the 2016 Games, where Princeton fencer Katharine Holmes competed, and Susannah Scanlan '14 helped the U.S. épée team win a bronze medal in London in 2012. Dudas returned to the Olympics as a coach for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
Dudas, a native of Hungary, came to Princeton from Notre Dame, where he was an assistant for five years. Dudas helped guide an Irish fencing team that finished a combined fourth of 29 schools at the 2006 NCAA Championships in his final season after helping direct the men's and women's program to combined team titles in 2003 and 2005. Focusing his tutelage on the foil and epee competitors, the Irish had 29 All-America finishes and 34 NCAA Championships appearances in those disciplines. While at Notre Dame, he coached at the Escrime du Lac, a fencing club, where his fencers won three national titles.
A 1992 graduate of Juhasz Gyula College in Hungary, Dudas came to the United States in 2000 after serving as a physical education teacher at both grade school and high school levels for 10 years, first as a student teacher and then as full-time staff. As a physical education teacher at Szechenyi Istvan High School, the handball team he led won the National Handball Championship in 1999, topping more than 250 teams. He also coached fencing at the Szegedi Postas Sport Club from 1985-1999. Once in the U.S., Dudas was a fencing coach at the Saturn Fencing Center in Cleveland, Ohio, from 2000-01 before moving to the Notre Dame, Ind., area. Before becoming a full-time assistant at UND in 2002-03, he served as a consultant to the Fighting Irish program for the 2002 season while heading up the fencing program at the Indiana Fencing Academy in Mishawaka, Ind.
| Year | Overall Record | Ivy League Record | NCAA Finish |
NCAA Participants, |
| 2006-07 | 9-5 (M), 9-6 (W) |
3-2 (M, 3rd), 2-4 (W, 4th) |
10th | Seven NCAA Participants, One All-American |
| 2007-08 | 11-5 (M), 8-6 (W) |
2-3 (M, 4th), 2-4 (W, 4th) |
10th | Six NCAA Participants, Three All-Americans |
| 2008-09 | 17-3 (M), 16-6 (W) |
3-2 (M, 3rd), 4-2 (W, 3rd) |
8th | Eight NCAA Participants, Four All-Americans |
| 2009-10 | 21-3 (M), 27-3 (W) |
5-0 (M, 1st), 6-0 (W, 1st) |
6th | 12 NCAA Participants, Six All-Americans |
| 2010-11 | 17-7 (M), 24-3 (W) |
2-3 (M, 4th), 6-0 (W, 1st) |
4th | 12 NCAA Participants, Seven All-Americans |
| 2011-12 | 23-2 (M), 23-3 (W) |
5-0 (M, 1st), 6-0 (W, 1st) |
2nd | 12 NCAA Participants, Nine All-Americans |
| 2012-13 | 19-5 (M), 29-2 (W) |
3-2 (M, 2nd), 6-0 (W, 1st) |
1st | 12 NCAA Participants, 10 All-Americans |
| 2013-14 | 18-11 (M), 31-0 (W) |
3-2 (M, 3rd), 6-0 (W, 1st) |
2nd | 12 NCAA Participants, Nine All-Americans |
| 2014-15 | 21-10 (M), 25-7 (W) |
3-2 (M, 3rd), 4-2 (W, 2nd) |
4th | 11 NCAA Participants, 10 All-Americans |
| 2015-16 |
22-10 (M), |
4-1 (M, 1st), 5-1 (W, 1st) |
3rd | 12 NCAA Participants, Eight All-Americans |
| 2016-17 | 23-7 (M), 31-2 (W) |
4-1 (M, 1st), 6-0 (W, 1st) |
4th | 11 NCAA Participants, Seven All-Americans |
| 2017-18 | 17-7 (M), 18-8 (W) |
2-3 (M, 4th), 5-1 (W, 2nd) |
7th | Nine NCAA Participants, Five All-Americans |
| 2018-19 | 21-7 (M), 16-15 (W) |
2-3 (M, 4th), 5-1 (W, 2nd) |
9th | Six NCAA Participants, Five All-Americans |
| 2019-20 | 24-7 (M), 25-7 (W) |
3-2 (M, 3rd), 4-2 (W, 2nd) |
None* | 12 NCAA Participants*, 12 All-Americans |
| 2020-21 | Season canceled due to COVID-19 | |||
| 2021-22 | 18-8 (M), 30-0 (W) |
1-3 (M, 4th), 6-0 (W, 1st) |
4th | 12 NCAA Participants, Seven All-Americans |
| 2022-23 | 26-3 (M), 30-3 (W) |
2-2 (M, 3rd), 6-0 (W, 1st) |
2nd | 12 NCAA Participants, 11 All-Americans |
| 2023-24 | 27-4 (M), 20-10 (W) |
3-1 (M, 1st), 5-1 (W, 1st) |
4th | 11 NCAA Participants, 6 All-Americans |
| 2024-25 | 26-6 (M), 27-7-1 (W) |
4-0 (M, 1st), 4-2 (W, 3rd) |
4th | 10 NCAA participants, 8 All-Americans |
| Totals | 360-110 (M), 415-94 (W) |
54-33 (M, 6 Ivy titles), 88-20 (W, 10 Ivy titles) |
187 NCAA Participants*, 128 All-Americans |
