While other fall sports teams have already begun the season, the boys’ fencing team, the Untouchables, doesn’t begin play until Wednesday, October 5. Yet, the team looks forward to its much anticipated rematch with Hunter College High School, which is coincidentally Stuyvesant’s first opponent of the season.
Tryouts were held during the first and second weeks of school. More than 40 students tried out for the 20 spots on the team.
“Tryouts this year were really intense. Since there can only be so many people on the team, we all had to bout each other quite a few times and the people with the worst records got cut,” said sophomore veteran Liam O’Brien.
Two new high schools, New Explorations in Science, Technology and Math High School (NEST+M) and Millennium High School, have joined the Manhattan Fencing Division with Stuyvesant this year. But the Untouchables know very little about them.
Since there are no scrimmages, the team won’t know the strengths of other teams in the division until Stuyvesant plays them during the regular season.
“We basically have the strongest team in the city and we worked really hard to get to where we are,” said senior and captain Jonathan Tang, “We practice outside of school as well but we almost never see other teams practice outside in fencing centers.”
Yet, the team knows much about Hunter’s team, which the Untouchables tied with for first place in the division last season. Stuyvesant then lost the championship match to them last November.
“The reason we lost last year was because we lost all four of our ‘A’ bouts, which are [each] worth one point out of a nine-point game. They trained a lot and we just got swept,” said Tang.
But the Hunter fencing program lost several integral players that graduated in June 2007, including one of the strongest players in the city, Michael Elfassy (’07). Besides leading his team to back-to-back city championships in 2006 and 2007, Elfassy also won several individual titles, as well as a gold medal for his club team at the Under-17 Junior Olympics in 2006.
With Elfassy off to Princeton University and most of the Untouchables’ lineup still intact from 2006, the Untouchables have good reason to be confident.
Tang said, “This year though, I don’t think they stand a chance and I’m 99 percent sure it’ll be our win.”
“Everybody in my starting team this year has a national rating,” said coach Joel Winston, coach of the Untouchables for only the second consecutive year since the co-ed team split into two.
Fencers like Tang and senior Angus Armstrong have a national rating from ‘A’ to ‘E’ based on their participation in non-school related national competitions held by the United States Fencing Association. An ‘A’ ranking is the highest ranking available. Most of the team is either ranked ‘D’ or ‘E’ based on the classification system.
Winston said, “I think we have a very strong team. We look undefeatable.”
