Birmingham Fencing Club making a point on the national level

When Sean Oh started fencing “just for fun” three years ago, it didn’t take long for him to become serious about the sport. For him, it’s all about the competition. 

“I like winning, just like everyone else,” he said. 

Sean, a sixth-grader at Our Lady of Sorrows and Homewood resident, said his mom, Emma, first signed him and his friends up for a birthday party at the Birmingham Fencing Club. After he took a summer camp for beginner fencers, he decided he wanted to take lessons.

“We didn’t take it very seriously then. We just fenced once a week on Tuesday, and then we started going to practice more and more, and then we started getting private lessons, and we kept going and going, and then we started going to tournaments,” Sean said. “The first one I went to, I won first place.”

Fencing is a combat sport during which points are made through contact with an opponent. The three modern disciplines include foil, épée and saber, and each weapon has slightly different rules and strategies. 

Emma Oh originally made her son try fencing because he was so competitive in group sports and would often blame everyone else when his team lost, she said.

“I decided to put him in something by himself, that’s why I brought him. We figured out he can’t blame anybody, he can only blame himself,” she laughed. “His confidence is very strong so [the] first time we tried just having fun, but he said, ‘Mommy, I want to win, I want to win,’ so we added more private lessons and [started to] go to the tournaments.”

Now, the family spends multiple nights a week at the Birmingham Fencing Club, where Sean has made many friends in practice and competition. They also spend many weekends going to tournaments all over the nation. The Birmingham Fencing Club gained popularity 20 years ago when Chinese National Team coaches and husband and wife duo Yuanjing Wang and Hongyung Sun moved to Birmingham to coach at the club.

When Yuanjing first moved to Birmingham from China in December 1998, he said only a handful of people invested in fencing greeted them at the airport. Twenty years later, he said, they have so many students that they are starting to outgrow their studio in Hoover. 

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, a Seoul Olympic medalist. Both were ready to take on new challenges and coach students competing to win, like Sean. 

“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 said when he and Hongyung received a lengthy and passionate email from David Arias, now the Birmingham Fencing Club president, they recognized an opportunity and chose to move to Birmingham over any other city in the U.S.

“When you think about it, little old 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,” said Arias, who started fencing in 1992 when he was 32 years old.

Yuanjing said now the Birmingham Fencing Club has students from most schools in the Birmingham area, including Homewood. 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.

Any person 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. 

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

“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 originally get into it for fitness, including Arias, he said 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,” Arias said.

Many of the students are also 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. One day, Sean said, he wants to be part of those invited students. 

“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.

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 gets the opportunity to “suit up” and try it out on their own. 

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