Princeton University Athletics
Players Mentioned
Fencers Set for NCAA Mid-Atlantic/South Regional at Lafayette
March 08, 2012 | Men's Fencing, Women's Fencing
Qualifying the maximum 12 fencers plays a big role in determining how a team finishes at the NCAA fencing finals, and Saturday's NCAA Mid-Atlantic/South Regional will help determine how many Tigers will be in Columbus, Ohio later this month.
Competition will get underway at 8 a.m. Saturday at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa.
The region will get seven bids in four of the six weapons, with men's epee and women's foil getting six apiece. There will also be two at-large bids per weapon to be spread across the country's four regions. The final list of participants at the NCAA Championships will be determined later next week.
At the 2011 regional meet, Edward Kelley and Hannah Safford won epee titles as Princeton had 10 fencers across the six weapons finish high enough for automatic qualification. Two more, for the maximum 12, made it via the at-large selection. Princeton went on to finish fourth at the NCAA Championship, matching its highest finish under the current men's/women's combined format that began in 1990.
With the Ivy League as the strongest fencing conference in the country, Princeton fencers won't have to contend with most of their Ivy brethren for the region's bids. The Mid-Atlantic/South region contains only one other Ivy League school, Penn, but does include fellow ranked or receiving-votes teams like Penn State, Duke, North Carolina, Johns Hopkins and Temple, as well as Drew, Fairleigh Dickinson, Haverford, NJIT and Stevens Tech. Princeton enters the competition as the third-ranked women's team and fourth-ranked men's team in the country as of the Feb. 22 CollegeFencing360.com poll.
In addition to defending regional champions Kelley and Safford, Princeton brings All-Ivy League honorees including foilists Alexander Mills and Ambika Singh, epeeists Jonathan Yergler and Katharine Holmes, saberist Joanna Cichomski and saberist siblings Robert Stone and Eliza Stone. That group helped Princeton sweep the Ivy League titles last month, making it five of the last six Ivy championships that Princeton has claimed between the men's and women's programs.