As fencing coach Alex Beguinet talks about his team before practice, he gestures animatedly with the blade he is repairing, slicing the air and faking jabs at bystanders.
This is a man excited by his team’s chances this season.
The 19th-year coach has reason to be upbeat. Despite the disadvantage of competing against schools that offer fencing scholarships, both the men’s and women’s teams finished with winning records last season.
The Blue Devils sent four fencers to the NCAA Championships, and Anne Kercsmar and Ibtihaj Muhammad earned All-American honors—the first two women to earn that designation in the history of Duke’s program. Kercsmar finished third in the nation in the epee, while Muhammad finished ninth in the saber.
The duo returns this season as sophomores, along with senior Nathan Bragg, who finished 18th in the foil last year at Nationals. With so much talent returning to a team that finished 12th overall at last year’s national meet, Beguinet has set goals high.
“We are trying to get everybody to regionals,” Beguinet said. “From regionals to nationals, if we can get four or five, we’d be good.”
The team is confident that it can reach the goals that the coach has set for it.
“We have a lot of new talent coming into the team,” Muhammad said. “Last year we only sent four people to the NCAAs, but we still came out 12th in the country, which is pretty impressive. I think we’ll have more than four in the NCAAs this year, so we’ll probably do better than 12th.”
Beguinet also has big expectations for his trio of returning national qualifiers. He expects Bragg to better last year’s finish in his final season and believes that Kercsmar has a good chance to repeat her performance from last year. But Muhammad drew special praise from her coach.
“Ibtihaj Muhammad in saber is doing well right now,” Beguinet said. “She went to the national competition [last year] and she’s on top.”
Muhammad is ready to top last year’s performance. She was excited to earn All-America honors in her freshman season but felt that her ninth-place finish was a “disappointment,” she said. Her goal for this season is to finish in the top four in the nation.
The Blue Devil with the highest expectations is Kercsmar, who will look to beat her bronze-medal finish as a freshman. Only one Duke fencer in the history of the program has finished higher than her third-place finish last year—Jeremy Kahn, who won a national championship in the epee in 1996. But Kercsmar has refused to let last year’s results put too much extra pressure on her.
“Of course it would be nice [to finish third or better], but I don’t think that’s going to happen. Just to make it to NCAAs, just a top-12 finish in general would be nice,” Kercsmar said. “There’s definitely some pressure that I’m putting on myself... [but] in general [Duke’s team] isn’t really high stress.”
The Blue Devils’ only major loss from a year ago is their other national meet competitor, Ben Hendricks, who placed 15th in the country last season as a freshman. He has since left the team for a Mormon mission to the Ukraine.
He will be replaced on the roster by a group of 14 freshmen. Although all are very good, none are outstanding, Beguinet said.
The team will also be helped by the return to health of junior epees Dorothy Hubbard and Nic Testerman. Hubbard missed a chance to qualify for nationals last season when she was sick and missed the regional competition, and Testerman was hindered by an injury all season.
The team begins its season Saturday in University Park, Pa., fencing against Penn State, St. John’s, Haverford, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.