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Happy June, Members,
So, welcome to Summer! The start of this season brings the Pan-American Championships in Peru, the FIE World Championships in Italy and our very own USA Fencing Summer Nationals in Phoenix.
While May provided a short break in the national event season, our Events team is on the road again putting on the SJCC and Division II NAC in Raleigh starting tomorrow. Speaking of NACs, we’ve got the schedule out some 77 days earlier than last year – we’ll be in Orlando, Fort Worth, San Jose, Charlotte, Portland, Salt Lake City and then finally we return to Columbus for the Summer Nationals. We’ll also have two SJCC events and a return to hosting FIE events — including, of course, the already announced Veteran World Championships, which will happen in Daytona Beach, Fla., this October. Unfortunately, we don’t have any IWAS events this season for parafencing, but we do anticipate a return of IWAS events to the United States in the coming quad ahead of LA 2028.
We know, too, that you need the announcement of what events will be coming to which NAC. Before we could share this, we needed to have in hand the FIE schedule, which was released on Tuesday. We were able to share the list of event combinations soon after. This delay is primarily to ensure that in the Olympic & Paralympic qualifying season, our Division I events are appropriately placed to avoid conflicts with FIE tournaments. Also, where Division I is located has a knock-on effect for other events.
I do want to take a moment to talk about where we allocate events. We’ve heard a great deal of feedback about events in Florida, in particular, as well as various other states associated with anti-LGBTQ+ laws and laws affecting women’s right to choose, in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Back in November of 2022, we announced a policy that gave first preference to cities and states with laws that respected those rights — however, several of our competitions are already contracted in such states, perhaps most notably including the FIE Veteran World Championships. The pace of these laws coming into effect is also rapidly changing the national picture.
We use Equality Maps, which is run by an independent nonprofit organization, to evaluate these issues. Right now, we have events contracted out into the 2025-2026 season, meaning there is a risk that laws are passed after we contract with a given city for a NAC, SJCC or another USA Fencing tournament. For example, between our announcement of the NAC schedule on May 3 and today, Florida moved from a “Low” rating to a “Negative” rating on this scale. I can confirm personally that we have begun to reject financially attractive proposals for NAC cities from those states marked as negative. In saying that, we do recognize that we have fencers in these states who do not support the state laws concerned, and notably may live in local jurisdictions which do not support such laws. As we enter Pride month, it’s important that we show our community we truly do care about our LGBTQ+ members.
Let’s move to the international scene, which was active in May with some fantastic results for Team USA. As seen on our Paris Qualification Tracker, Team USA currently sits in the Top 4 for Women’s Foil, Men’s Foil, Women’s Saber and Men’s Saber — meaning we’re able to send the maximum number of athletes in those weapons to the Olympic Games. In Epee, our Women are tops in the America zone, which also would mean a full team. In Men’s Epee, this year’s NCAA Champion, Jonas Hansen (Harvard University / Olympia Fencing Center) sits in the individual ranking for America.
It’s early in the qualification cycle, but this is a positive start for Team USA. In talking to a Pan-American Games team member from the 1980s this month, it’s amazing to reflect on the growth of achievement of American fencing in the last few Games, to the point where we expect to be among the best teams in the world. On the parafencing side, our team will return to Paralympic qualifying action in July at the IWAS World Cup in Poland.
It's vital we do what America does best: innovate, to keep on top. The American system encourages that among our personal coaches — go out there and do it, try new things. Fencing is about solving problems, and that is where our internal competitive system does its best work.
Our strong results are evidenced by the members of our 2023 Senior World team, who will compete this July at the final FIE Worlds before Paris 2024. Before that, though, our amazing women travel to Tbilisi, Georgia, this weekend for World Cup action. Next, our Senior World team heads to Lima, Peru, for the Pan-American Championships, also known as Zonals. It’s definitely the business end of the system. Keep watching USA Fencing’s social media channels for up-to-the-minute updates on all of these competitions as well as to track both Olympic & Paralympic qualification.
Talking of positive celebrations, we had a great first Fencing Foundation Fete in New York City — raising more than $100,000 for the U.S. Fencing Foundation. We’ll be back next year for another great New York night as we send our Olympic and Paralympic teams off to Paris, no doubt including representatives from the Big Apple once again. Next year’s co-chairs will be Victoria Voytek and Joe Inzerillo; thank you to both Victoria and Joe for offering up their time to help us put on a great 2024 event, and thank you to the more than 230 people who showed up and made it a great night in New York.
Part of what makes it possible for us to field a team for Paris and grow the sport at the grassroots level is our wonderful sponsors. While membership and events provide the vast majority of funding for USA Fencing, sponsorship is an emerging area for our NGB. To be successful, we need you to support those sponsors so that they, and other potential sponsors, see fencing as a worthwhile investment.
This is very challenging for smaller sports who don’t often fit into the overall marketing strategies, and it takes time to establish the connection with the sport looking at the data behind our membership. Last month, we announced the organization’s first non-endemic sponsorship agreement with Naked Wines. You can support them (and, by doing so, support USA Fencing) by making a purchase at nakedwines.com/usafencing. I want to be clear of course that Naked Wines only have interest in reaching out to our significant population of fencing adults (21 and up), veterans, and, of course, the families who support our youth athletes. Naked Wines kindly also supplied our Gala event in New York City to rave reviews from those in the room!
We also extended our partnerships with Thorne and Mount Sinai and merged our existing member wellness program designed to provide counseling services to our members through BetterHelp. We’ve heard feedback on the latter partnership which we are considering closely. More are in the works, and we hope you’ll support those sponsors.
Another big thing to happen this June will be the conclusion of our At-Large elections to the USA Fencing Board of Directors. There’s a few days left to cast your vote, and about 80% of those eligible still have to do so. (Believe it or not, this actually is good turnout for an NGB election!) We highly encourage you to take a look at the Election page and to cast your vote in the way that you wish. Among the three elected and two further At-Large Directors (David Arias and Peter Burchard), one individual will be the Chair of USA Fencing after the September board retreat.
At the upcoming Board meeting, the Nominating Committee have recommended the exciting addition of Amanda Nguyen to the Board of Directors as we seek to continue to improve our culture. Amanda’s dedication to protecting victims of sexual abuse as well as a multitude of other skills will be a fantastic addition to our volunteer leadership. Amanda is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Time Woman of the Year, and was exposed to our sport during her time at Havard. I cannot write enough about Amanda’s unbelievable impact on our nation, and encourage you to go and take a look at Amanda’s organization, RISE. I can barely think any other NGB has quite such a qualified independent. I’m going to take a moment to recognize the Nominating Committee as well as Selina Kaing, Nzingha Prescod OLY and Benjamin Cohen in helping to convince Amanda to join us.
As we’ve spoken about here and elsewhere in USA Fencing communications, there are some important changes coming up – many of which are currently proposed and will be voted on by our Board of Directors on June 10, notably together with our budget and operating plan for 2023-2024’s season.
In those documents you will see that, pending board approval, membership fees and event pricing are going up. It’s unfortunate, but it’s a business necessity. I get it; it feels like you spend so much on fencing already, and you do. It’s worth remembering when you go to a NAC, the registration fees come to USA Fencing but the money you spend on hotels, airfare, food and so forth doesn’t. I know that doesn’t change the total cost you feel to your pocket. The reality, though, is that since 2018-2019, compound interest is up over 20.75%, and we are seeing rises in the largest areas of spending (airfare and hotels, particularly) in some cases over 50%. USA Fencing’s largest expense areas are running our national tournaments and putting Team USA on the field of play. The largest portion of those expenses are travel related.
We’ll post a breakdown of our budget in full, but I want to be up front to say that there will be cost rises in 2023-2024, and that is never popular. It’s happening across the world, and across our nation in almost every business, but we do understand that doesn’t soften the news. For those who need financial assistance, though, we encourage you to take a look at our Grace program, which can provide assistance.
Similarly, many clubs have already given feedback on our updated club membership structure, which sees the price of club membership rated according to the size of club, rewarding the fastest-growing clubs for bringing people to the sport of fencing. This means, in practice, every USA Fencing premium club should pay less than last year. Meanwhile, we eliminated the affiliate membership and instead have a tier for clubs who are truly community based, are very small, or are collegiate, high school or other outreach-based clubs. These clubs will pay a lower rate of $199. We appreciate that this change is to a long-standing program, but so far we’ve had some very positive feedback. In many cases, where some clubs thought this was not a good change, after a conversation they realized they would actually benefit.
We’re continuing to look for ways to improve our club and membership services and to eliminate some of the frustrations that our clubs have. These take time, but we are on the journey.
Similarly, we are committed to growing the sport. We’ve just now seated our NCAC (National Collegiate Advisory Committee), otherwise known as the “Fighting for Fencing” group, with commissioners, coaches and athletic directors from across the NCAA’s Division I, Division II and Division III programs. This group is helping us to grow our support in colleges, while we’ve also sat a similar group for high schools designed to help us build more “New Jerseys,” currently the only state with fully sanctioned high school fencing.
That’s a great deal of heavy items, so I’ll leave you all to get back to what matters – being on the strip. Good luck in Raleigh, and I’ll see you in Phoenix!
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