Truth be told, Brandeis will never be confused with a collegiate sports fans' paradise. Fans do not flock to Gosman for men's basketball games versus the likes of Suffolk University and Worcester Polytechnic the way Duke students come out in droves to watch their beloved Blue Devils go to battle at historic Cameron Indoor Stadium. Our yearning for top-notch NCAA competition is only intensified by Brandeis' close proximity to Division I stalwarts Boston College (BC), Boston University (BU) and Harvard University.Most Brandeisians probably don't realize that their school has one team that consistently outclasses both Harvard and BC. "It would be nice if people knew that we just annihilated Boston College," Brandeis fencer Keith Allen '04 said, "but I'm not particularly frustrated by the lack of recognition we get. It's the nature of the sport."

Obscure fencing lingo such as "Epee" and "Saber," which describe two of the three weapons employed by participants of the sport, have never quite infiltrated the unofficial dictionary of American athletics. The subtle aesthetics of fencing just do not resonate like a monster home run or powerful slam dunk.

"I think people aren't always aware of the rules of fencing," said Brandeis fencer Miriam Kingsberg '03, herself an Epee. "And I've even heard other students say that it's not a real sport, which is completely untrue. It's a very intense mental and physical activity."

Head Coach Bill Shipman is the architect of the University's most successful sports program. Under the unwavering guidance of this soft-spoken University of North Carolina graduate, Brandeis has boasted 10 All-Americas during Shipman's 21-year tenure. In 1994, the women's team finished an astounding eighth in the country.

With a grueling schedule that features St. John's University (their men's and women's teams both finished with a top-three ranking in 2002), ninth-ranked Yale (the Bulldog women are sixth) and UAA rival New York University (the Purple Violet men placed tenth in the nation last spring), Shipman asks a lot of his athletes.

"Starting in the third week of October, we usually practice five days a week. Our biggest, most important meets are between the end of January and the first weekend in March. It's a very busy time where we usually fence about six weekends out of seven," he said.

"We try to get a commitment out of our fencers, not just an interest. We try to teach fencing, not just put them out there and see how they do, but try to improve everybody," Shipman said.

"And, we try to sell the concept of team support," continued the coach. "If everybody supports everybody, we all do better. Sometimes that works very well, sometimes moderately so, but that's what we try to do and I think it makes it more enjoyable for the students. There's less pressure coming from within."

The Northeast, particularly New York City and its suburbs, have become an amateur fencing hotbed. "Myself, Jeremy Simpson '06, and [Captain] Steve Zuilkowski '03 all fenced for different Long Island high school teams," Allen said, "and we often competed against each other." Like most NCAA fencers, Allen has competed in the Junior Olympics, numerous regional competitions and the North American Circuits (NAC). He belonged to both the Long Island Fencers Club and New York Fencers Club.

"Most of our fencers," Kingsberg said, "especially on the men's team, grew up going to fencing clubs in New York City and Philadelphia. Some just started once they got here."

With Ivy League admissions awaiting a majority of the country's best amateur fencers, Shipman employs an aggressive courtship strategy. "We do recruit. I send out brochures to high school coaches, I go to tournaments sometimes and put out brochures. I'll go to a tournament and take down a kid's name and write him a letter, so we're trying to get our name out there so kids get interested."

While his peers who are subjected to the demands of big-budget athletic departments, Shipman has the luxury of molding his athletes. "We look for kids with some upside, either athletically or competitively. Maybe they don't have too much competitive experience yet, but they have a lot of ability," he said. "Some nationally-ranked kids will be interested in us, but very few of them have come, because there's just too many other choices for them with scholarships and the Ivy League. So we get very few kids that are ranked in the top-20 in the country, but we do get some down below that who are very good fencers."

"We have a pretty good reputation as a fencing school," Shipman said, "so for a kid who wants to fence, but is maybe not quite an Ivy League-caliber or marginally good enough student to get into Yale or Penn, he/she would look at us. Maybe he's a very good high school fencer, but not a national fencer, so he knows he may not get to fence on the team at Columbia or Notre Dame, he'll look at us."

As evidenced by the men's team's gut-wrenching 14-13 loss to St. John's at this year's Brandeis Invitational, there are very few teams that intimidate Shipman's troops. While Shipman acknowledges that a number of his team's opponents underestimate the Division III Judges, he's quick to list the team's accomplishments against the Goliath's of the sport. "It's true that they don't take us as seriously as they should," he said, "but we've had some success against those schools. Our men's team has beaten Harvard five of the last eight times we've met. We've never beaten Yale, but we've given them a run a few times, so hopefully one day we'll catch them."

Shipman concedes that some schools associated with high-powered sports programs don't adequately fund their fencing teams, and are therefore much more vulnerable. "We're pretty even with some of the schools that don't put quite as much emphasis on fencing and don't have the tradition that Yale, Columbia and Penn do. Brown is one of those teams. We beat Boston College and North Carolina most of the time. Duke, for instance, doesn't support its fencing team like they do its basketball or lacrosse team, so we have a shot against them," he said.

"We beat almost all of our Division III opponents," Shipman added, "especially the men; the women less so. MIT beats us sometimes, but other than that we beat almost everybody."

Shipman, who counts Brown, MIT, and NYU as the Judges' arch-rivals, often feels the same neglect his fencers do. "I think we get as much recognition as the other sports here do, which is not very much. We get more recognition than a lot of other fencing teams do," he said. "Say Boston College, I think we probably get more than they do. But I think it's more a department-wide thing than it is just for fencing. We have quite a few fencers on the team that are actually pretty well known on the campus. So it's not a fencing problem as much as a general Brandeis problem.