Birmingham Fencing Club making a point on the national level

When Yuanjing Wang first moved to Vestavia Hills from China, there was barely a handful of people who knew what fencing was. Twenty years later, he said, they have so many students that they can barely find the space to put them.

“A lot of coaches ask me, ‘Where are you from?’ and I say ‘Birmingham,’ and they say, ‘England?’ and I say, ‘No, Alabama,’” Yuanjing laughed. 

Yuanjing, a former Olympic referee for fencing and Chinese National Foil Champion, said even though it was a risk moving to Birmingham to coach a new fencing club, he wasn’t nervous. Neither was his wife, Seoul Olympic medalist Hongyung Sun. Both were coaches for the Chinese National Team and ready to take on new challenges. 

Fencing is a combat sport where points are scored through the contact with an opponent, with the three modern disciplines including foil, épée and saber. Each are weapons that have slightly different rules and strategies to using them. Fencers wear protective gear, as well.

When Yuanjing and Hongyung received a lengthy and passionate email from David Arias, now the Birmingham Fencing Club president, they said they recognized an opportunity. Arias, who started fencing in 1992 when he was 32, was thrilled to learn that high-level coaches were considering the Birmingham area. 

“[I told them] we were committed to making our program successful, and we had started some programs at a few locations in the city, so students would already be available. We would help market the club, help their daughter get into the club in the Vestavia school system ... To make a long story short, they eventually chose Birmingham over a lot of programs,” Arias said. 

Yuanjing, who said he’s come to love Birmingham and all the people in it, said now the Birmingham Fencing Club has students from most of the schools in the Birmingham area. A large amount live in Vestavia because that is where he and his wife, along with Arias, still live. 

Some people, Arias added, drive from Tuscaloosa and Montgomery to be part of the club, and others have even moved from other states because of the level of coaching. Students who have been through the club have gotten fencing scholarships to Ivy League schools across the nation. These several dozen students have their pictures displayed on a wall inside the Hoover studio.

“When you think about it, little ol’ Birmingham, nobody had really heard about the fencing community … It’s really been a great thing for them, and our club has grown from that first 13 people that met them at the airport in 1998 to probably a little over 100 folks now,” Arias said.

Anyone of any gender, physical capability or age from 6 to 90 is able to try fencing at Birmingham Fencing Club and even compete in national tournaments. Last year, Arias said, the oldest fencer in the club died at age 98 and had fenced competitively until he was 90 years old. The group also has a big number of veteran fencers who have been fencing for more than 40 years, some competitively, some recreationally. 

Sophia Li, a 10-year-old who attends Vestavia Hills Elementary Central, has spent the past three years learning fencing at the Birmingham Fencing Club.

“When I first learned fencing, I learned the basics like how to advance, how to retreat or how to lunge, and then I learned how to get priority,” Li said, “and then once I mastered all that, I started to learn more techniques.”

Fencing, Arias said, is a cumulative learning sport, like math, where you figure things out and advance over time. Within a year, he said, people tend to develop a “significant confidence” in the sport, and many people compete in bigger tournaments across the nation in as little as three months. 

“It’s very much an individual sport. You don’t have to be some high-level, naturally gifted athlete to be a good fencer. The physical aspect will come along if you continue to fence, but in that respect, it’s an unusual sport, as well,” Arias said. 

Li said fencing is both competitive and done in good fun, and many of her opponents she goes against in practice are also her friends. Most of her other friends at school though, she said, haven’t heard much about fencing.

Arias said for a lot of people who try it out, there’s an aspect of romanticism to the sport.

“In one way or another, everybody brings that interest to the sport of fencing from seeing movies to playing and sword fighting from when you were a kid to Star Wars lightsaber fighting,” he said.

Although, some people, such as himself he said, originally get into it for fitness, they fall in love with it after a while, and it becomes a life-long passion.

“If you love competition, it’s a sport where your opponent is right in front of you, and where if you succeed or fail, it’s entirely on your shoulders,” he said.

Even though people choose fencing for the intense competition, he added, many of the students are friends outside of the club and even travel to competitions together. Birmingham itself only has a couple of competitions each year, so fencing requires a lot of weekends of traveling to complete regionally or nationally. Last year, 35 Birmingham Fencing Club students were invited to summer nationals to compete.

“Other coaches recognize what Birmingham has done, the USA Fencing know what Birmingham has done, the NCAA college athletes. We are very well recognized as having exceptional coaches in a place where people wouldn’t have figured. A club like ours is a bit of an anomaly,” Arias said. 

“…If a student comes to fencing, and they just want to have friends and do something fun, that’s great and we certainly encourage that, but if they want to get a scholarship to Harvard and compete in places like Paris at that level, our coaches have taken students there and can take them there, and that’s pretty exciting to see that happen.”

The best thing to do to “get a flavor for the sport,” Arias said, is to come out on their Fencing Free Fridays, which is the first Friday of every month. At 10 a.m., everyone who comes is taught more about the sport and then gets the opportunity to “suit up” and try it out on their own. 

Go to fencingclub.org for more information about Birmingham’s club.