100 Years Of Princeton Fencing

What better place is there to start talking about the ongoing celebration of 100 years of Princeton Fencing than with ... Pete Carril.

The Hall-of-Fame men's basketball coach used to talk about people who have long since passed away while their names live on in awards. Carril would say that the people who win those awards honor the person whose name is on their trophy, even if they have no idea who that might be. 

Carril was speaking specifically about the Benjamin Franklin Bunn Award, which is the highest honor for the men's basketball team. TigerBlog can still hear Carril as he basically says "Whoever he was, you owe it to him to be at your best every day."

The same, TB presumes, applies also to buildings, boats — and even a fencing room. 

The fencing room in Jadwin Gym is located on C Level, two floors below where Carril's teams played. It is officially the Stan Sieja Fencing Room.

Who was Stan Sieja? Well, for one thing, like Carril he only would wear bowties, the kind that he tied himself. Also like Carril, he drew heavily on his family background, Sieja from Poland and Carril from Spain.

Stan Sieja was the coach of Princeton fencing from 1946-82, his tenure ending with his death in October of 1982, just prior to the start of the season. How well regarded was he? 

Consider this, from one of his former fencers, Paul Schmidt, the captain of that final team:

It is difficult to paint a portrait or give an idea of a man like Stanley Sieja to those who did not know him. Any student who has worked closely with a professor on a daily basis for four years will have an inkling. Any student who has been on an athletic team with a coach who was absolutely devoted to the individual and group development of his students and who loved his work and his students beyond necessity, any student who has loved his or her coach to the extent that the coach ceases to be a weekday training figure and becomes a dominant influence in thought and action — that student also will have a grasp of the quality of this man. When someone dear to you dies, it seems always that little incidents and personality characteristics remain most closely in the memory. 

To this day, every fencer, male or female, who steps into that room on C Level is honoring Sieja's legacy. 

To see the fencers who go in and out of that room all these years has given TB a real appreciation of how difficult the sport is. It requires balance, stamina, hand-eye coordination, quickness, strength. When you see fencers take off the gear after a workout, you can tell by how soaked they are. 

Fencing on the Princeton campus goes back longer than 100 years, all the way to the 1800s, when lessons were part of physical education. Intercollegiate fencing goes back to the 19th century as well, and there were individual Princetonians who competed.

It wasn't until 1925 that an official team began to compete. It wasn't until 1988 until there was a women's varsity team. 

Fencing has produced the third-highest number of Olympians at Princeton — a total of 23 in all — behind rowing and track and field. The most recent Olympic Games in Paris last summer saw Maia Weintraub win gold, making her the fifth Tiger to win a medal, along with bronze medals for Henry Breckinridge in 1920, Tracy Jaekel in 1928, Maya Lawrence in 2012 and Susie Scanlan in 2012.

Princeton won the 1964 NCAA championship (the men) and 2013 (co-ed). The men have won 18 Ivy League championships. The women have won 13.

There have been nine men who have won NCAA individual titles:  Chambless Johnston (1951, sabre); Henry Kolowrat (1954, epée); Kinmont Hoitsma (1956, epée); Bill Hicks (1964, foil), Harald Winkmann (1994 épée), Max Pekarev (1996, sabre), Soren Thompson (2001, épée), Jonathan Yergler (2013, épée) and Tristan Szapary (2024, épée).  

There have been women who have won NCAA individual titles: Eva Petschnigg ’03 (2000, foil), Eliza Stone ’13 (2013, saber), Anna Van Brummen ’17 (2017, epee), Kasia Nixon (2018, epee), Maia Chamberlain (2018, saber) and Weintraub (2022, foil).

This weekend, more than 200 alums and friends will gather to celebrate the first 100 years of Princeton Fencing. There will be a lot to celebrate for a program that has brought so much to the history of the University.

They've certainly done Stan Sieja proud.