I need to address a concerning scheduling decision that impacts our national team athletes. The 2025 April Division 1 Championships and NAC in Los Angeles (April 11-14, 2025) overlaps with the final days of the 2025 Junior and Cadet World Championships in Wuxi, China (April 7-15, 2025) – a situation that creates significant challenges for our sport’s top performers and creates a huge conflict of potential choices for event attendance.

This conflict particularly affects around 40 of our most dedicated athletes who earned their spots on the Junior and Cadet World Championship team. While I’m certain this wasn’t intentional, the impact on these fencers is substantial and needs to be addressed.

The implications are serious: Junior World Team members will miss the Division 1 National Championship – their final qualification opportunity for the Senior Team Pan American Zonal Championship and Senior World Championships. Moreover, our Cadet and Junior fencers will lose crucial chances to earn national points across multiple categories (Cadet/Junior/Senior), affecting their rankings and future team selection prospects.

This scheduling conflict highlights an ongoing need for more comprehensive planning of our national events. While past scheduling challenges have often led to increased costs or logistical complications for parents, fencers and families, this particular overlap directly impacts our athletes’ qualification pathways and their ability to represent the USA internationally.

I recognize the practical realities of event planning. Venue contracts, vendor agreements, and hotel commitments make it difficult to shift the April NAC to its traditional late-April timeframe that close to the event. Finding an alternative venue at this point would be extremely challenging, if not impossible.

However, we can still take corrective action. A review of the qualification criteria for this specific situation is needed. Perhaps we could freeze points as they stand before this NAC, though we’d also need to address the rolling points impact for next year’s events.

This isn’t just about individual competitions – it’s about supporting our sport’s future. Our national team’s international success drives fencing’s growth across the country. Just look at how champions like Lee Keifer, Lauren Scruggs, and Nick Itkin have inspired countless young athletes to take up our sport.

The new board has an opportunity to review our event planning process. This isn’t simply an operational issue – it’s fundamental to how we support our athletes’ development and maintain our competitive excellence internationally. Let’s use this situation as a catalyst for improving our planning processes to better serve all our fencers. This is a call for the newly elected board to make the required changes.