What a great way to finish a year! We can all head into the holiday season with smiles and pride. We are ecstatic to report our results from this past weekend’s Northern California RYC at Treasure Island in San Francisco. Our fencers took home 17 (!) medals – in 7 out of 12 events in which our team had participated. As a second-year club, we are thrilled to be competing with the best fencers in the area and showing great results.
Read through these impressive results!
Gold:
– Alexander Javorski in Y14ME (second RYC Gold in a row!)
– Sanil Sharma in Y10ME
Silver: Bartosz Kuligowski in Y10ME
Bronze:
– Michael Zhang in Y12ME
– Natalie Gebala in Y10WE
5th
– Jakov Shur in Y10ME
– Ethan Chu in Y12ME
6th
– William Elloway in Y10ME
– Angela Du in Y10WE
– Sanil Sharma in Y12ME
7th
– Catherine Lange in Y12WF
– Brianna Bell in Y10WE
8th
– Cole Amacker in Y10ME
– Marie-Anne Xu in Y10WF
– Maxim Ptacek in Y12ME
– Sonia Bulavko in Y12WE
– Arshome Sahagun in Y14ME (faced Gold-winner Alexander Javorski in quarterfinals, so only one could advance)
A few things to note about specific events:
Y12ME: AFM swept half of the top 8!
Y10ME: We took Gold and Silver, so yes—it was an AFM final!
What a list of results!
We want to sincerely congratulate our fencers: from the experienced who shined by taking home top medals to those new to the sport who contributed to a team spirit to be reckoned with. We saw a new confidence in all of you as a team. We want to congratulate our coaches who work hard every class and every lesson to help our fencers reach moments like these where hard work can be celebrated as a group.
We didn’t earn 17 medals by simply performing well as individuals. We watched our fencers help each other, cheer each other on, and together create a momentum and camaraderie that took each fencer one step closer to their great performance. We watched our experienced fencers lead the newcomers, making them feel comfortable and welcoming them into the team. They explained the flow to our newer fencers, helped them find strips, helped them stretch and warm up, explained the rules, and were overall great models. We watched our coaches passionately guiding and pushing our fencers, working just as hard as the ones out there on the strips.
We watched our foil fencers wow everyone with their progress. We all know that mastering the art of foil fencing takes a bit more patience and finesse, and each one of our foil fencers showed significant improvement. Almost every one of them improved their results over the last competition. After winning several pool play bouts and DE rounds, they made AFM very proud of their progress.
We watched one of our fencers show a great example of the AFM spirit. Our fencer Sanil Sharma saw a fencer from another club go onto a strip for an epee bout with a foil mask during Y10ME. The referee said “no way!” and insisted he replace the mask with an epee mask. The fencer’s face fell because he had no way to replace the mask quickly enough to avoid a technical defeat. Without any prompting from anyone else, Sanil quickly ran up to the boy and handed over his own epee mask so the boy could fence. Thank you, Sanil, for showing others what AFM is all about!
Above all else, we watched a family have fun together—enjoying the fruit of much labor. We’ve worked hard since the first day of this season to be the best fencers that we can, and this past weekend it showed. The kids made new friends, reconnected with fencers from other clubs, bonded together as a team, cheered across weapons, genders, and age categories, and behaved with true team sportsmanship.
Beyond congratulations, we want to say “Thank You”. For believing in your AFM team the way that we do and being a part of something special and close to our hearts. We look forward to the next RYC at the end of February and hope to see another AFM sweep. Onto the next!
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