‘En Garde!’ Saucon Freshman to Compete at Fencing Jr. Olympics

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated.

Fencing isn’t a sport that’s offered at Saucon Valley–or practically anywhere in the Lehigh Valley, for that matter–but that hasn’t stopped SVHS freshman Sara Patterson from becoming an accomplished swordswoman.

At 15, she’s already so accomplished that she recently qualified for the 2015 Junior Olympic Fencing Championships, which will be held in Richmond, Va., from Feb. 13-16.

In Richmond she will compete against teens from across the country in the under 17 “Cadette” group.

Patterson, who lives in Lower Saucon Township, has to travel to Hatfield, Bucks County and Lambertville, N.J., four times a week to train at the Bucks County Academy of Fencing, but the extra effort has paid off.

“My goal is to get into the Olympics,” she said during a recent interview in Hellertown. And if that doesn’t happen, she looks forward to a lifetime of fencing, which she noted is a sport people can compete in well into their seventies.

Patterson is an electric foil fencer, meaning she competes using a foil that contains a socket underneath the guard. In addition to foil fencing, the other two types are saber and épée.

In competition, the foil must make contact with an opponent’s lamé (a wire-mesh jacket covering a target area) to score a “touche” (a hit).

“It takes two seconds to get a touche,” Sara’s father, Jeff, explained.

Bouts last three minutes, but can end after as little as 20 seconds–which Sara said is what happened when she faced a particularly fierce competitor.

“It’s a physical and mental challenge,” she said. “You’re basically playing a physical chess game.”

“It’s so fast,” added her dad, who said the complex rules of fencing can be a bit intimidating for the uninitiated. If you don’t know anything about the sport, attending a match can leave you feeling “a little lost,” he admitted.

To help introduce young people to the sport, the Bucks County Academy offers an introductory class called “A Taste of Fencing,” but locally there is little in the way of fencing instruction, he explained.

The Easton Fencing Club meets Thursday evenings for group instruction and has “open bouting” (informal, drop-in fencing) at the Easton YMCA on Saturdays–and Lafayette College in Easton has a team–but most of the action at the high school level is in New Jersey.

Sara said she was interested in starting a fencing a club at Saucon Valley, but the costs would have been prohibitive.

After high school, she hopes to participate at the collegiate level at a school with a superior team, such as Penn State, the University of Pennsylvania or Princeton.

And what do her classmates at Saucon Valley think about her fencing?

“They just think ‘that’s so different,'” Sara said. But her friends also think it’s “cool.”