Collegiate fencing

Fencing

Fencing, which is also known as modern fencing to distinguish it from historical fencing, is a family of combat sports using bladed weapons.Fencing is one of four sports which have been featured at every one of the modern Olympic Games...

has existed for a long time. Some of the earliest programs in the US came from the Ivy League

Ivy League

The Ivy League is an athletic conference comprising eight private institutions of higher education in the Northeastern United States. The conference name is also commonly used to refer to those eight schools as a group...

 schools, but now there are over 100 fencing programs in the US. Both clubs and varsity teams participate in the sport, however only the varsity teams may participate in the NCAA

National Collegiate Athletic Association

The National Collegiate Athletic Association is a semi-voluntary association of 1,281 institutions, conferences, organizations and individuals that organizes the athletic programs of many colleges and universities in the United States...

 championship tournament. Due to the limited number of colleges that have fencing teams, teams fence inter-division (teams from Division I schools to Division III), and all divisions participate in the NCAA Championships.

Collegiate fencing tournaments are "team tournaments" in a sense, but contrary to what many people expect, collegiate meets are not run as 45-touch relays. Schools compete against each other one at a time. In each weapon and gender, three fencers from each school fence three fencers on the opposing team in five-touch bouts. (Substitutions are allowed, so more than three fencers per squad can compete in a tournament.) A fencer's individual results in collegiate tournaments and regional championships are used to select the fencers who will compete in NCAA championships. Individual results for fencers from each school are combined to judge the school's overall performance and to calculate how it should be placed in a given tournament.

See also

• List of NCAA fencing schools
• Intercollegiate Fencing Association
  Intercollegiate Fencing Association
  The Intercollegiate Fencing Association is the oldest collegiate fencing conference in the United States. It is affiliated with the Eastern College Athletic Conference .-Membership:The IFA has 12 members...
  
   (IFA)
• National Intercollegiate Women's Fencing Association
  National Intercollegiate Women's Fencing Association
  The National Intercollegiate Women's Fencing Association is a women's collegiate fencing organization in the United States. The organization was founded as the IWFA in 1929 by two New York University students, Julia Jones and Dorothy Hafner and Betsy Ross, a student at Cornell University who based...
  
   (NIWFA)
• United States Association of Collegiate Fencing Clubs (USACFC)
  USACFC
  The United States Association of Collegiate Fencing Clubs is a non-profit corporation that, among other things, puts on the largest annual collegiate fencing event in the world.- Sites of USACFC National Championships :...
  
   (including national championships)
• College athletics
  College athletics
  College athletics refers primarily to sports and athletic competition organized and funded by institutions of tertiary education . In the United States, college athletics is a two-tiered system. The first tier includes the sports that are sanctioned by one of the collegiate sport governing bodies...
  
  
• High school fencing
  High school fencing
  Fencing at the high school level has varied in popularity. Fencing was once part of many schools' physical education curriculum, and many schools had clubs and would compete in inter-school tournaments. In the second half of the 20th century, fencing gradually faded from physical education...