March 23, 2007

The Notre Dame men's fencing team will have plenty of key bouts during Friday's action at the NCAAs, as 36 of the 54 bouts for the Irish will come versus fencers from the other four top contenders. The showdowns will include all three ND weapons facing St. John's, plus foil vs. Columbia and Ohio State, epee vs. Columbia and Penn State, and sabre vs. PSU and OSU.

Several other elite fencers await the Irish during day-2, with those top opponents including the likes of sabreists Ben Igoe (Rutgers) and Teddy Levitt (Stanford), the Harvard foil duo of Enoch Woodhouse and Kai Itameri-Kinter, and epeeists Teddy Sherrill (Harvard) and Clayton Kenney (Stanford).

THREE WAYS TO FOLLOW THE ACTION - Notre Dame fencing fans will have three ways - text message updates, hotline and PDF results/standings sheets - to follow the daily action from the 2007 NCAA Fencing Championships on an hourly basis, all courtesy of the ND Sports Information Department (note that Friday's team updates will be at approximately 11:00, noon and 1:00, plus a medal-round wrapup around 3:00).

• Irish ALERT free text-message updates are available to your cell phone or other mobile device ... updates typically will be sent at the top of each hour and may even be sent separately at that time for each weapon (and/or each fencer), based on the importance and amount of data for each particular update period. Updates will include information on individual results and team standings. To sign up - at this time, you must sign up for men's and women's fencing to receive updates for all four days of the NCAAs (may be changed soon to one signup) - see the following link (you also may sign up for text updates on other ND sports):
http://my.textcaster.com/ServePopup.aspx?id=535

• The Notre Dame Sports Hotline provides a recap of each game and often will include special in-game updates for postseason action (or for doubleheader days). This hs been a popular option in the past, including moer than 600 calls for fencing updates during the 2006 NCAAs. To access the hotline, call 574-631-3000, choose option 8 and then press "3" for the fencing updates. Similar to the text updates, the Hotline will be updated around the top of the hour througout each day of competition.

• A PDF document link has been created that will be updated throughout the four-day event, with the first page including the most updated team standings, followed by single pages for each Notre Dame fencer that will include their individual results as they are completed. The link is included below and currently includes the text of this release but will change over to the 12-page results/standings format later on March 22:
http://www.cstv.com/auto_pdf/p_hotos/s_chools/nd/sports/c-fenc/auto_pdf/NCAA07FencingHourlyResults

THE SCHEDULE (at Drew University, in the Simon Forum and Athletic Center)
Thursday, March 22
10:00 a.m. - Men's Weapons, Rounds 1-4

Friday, March 23
9:30 a.m. - Men's Weapons, Rounds 5-7 (end of men's team competition), followed by the six semifinal bouts and 3rd-place bouts
2:30 p.m. - Men's Individual Weapon Finals, in the order of sabre, foil and epee

Saturday, March 24
10:00 a.m. - Women's Weapons, Rounds 1-4

Sunday, March 25
9:30 a.m. - Women's Weapons, Rounds 5-7 (end of women's team competition), followed by the six semifinal bouts
2:00 p.m. - Women's Individual Weapon Finals, in the order of sabre, foil and epee

FRIAY'S NCAA FENCING SCHEDULE (DAY 1) - The men will fence the final nine (rounds 5-7) of their 23 round-robin bouts on Friday, beginning at 9:30 a.m.. Here's who the Irish will face in second-day action:

MEN'S EPEE (jr. Greg Howard and soph. Karol Kostka, paired with Pennsylvania's Benjamin Wieder)
Round 5 - vs. Harvard's Teddy Sherrill and the St. John's duo of Benjamin Bratton and Stanley Vaksman
Round 6 - vs. the Penn State pair of Steffan Launer and Arthur Urman and Drew's Dana Sanford
Round 7 - vs. the Columbia duo of Max Czapanskiy and Dwight Smith and Stanford's Clayton Kenney

MEN'S FOIL (jr. Jakub Jedrkowiak and soph. Mark Kubik, paired with Yale's John Gurrieri)
Round 5 - vs. the Harvard duo of Kai Itameri-Kinter and Enock Woodhouse , plus Alexis Landreville of St. John's
Round 6 - vs. the Columbia pair of Kurt Getz and Scott Sugimoto, plus Will Friedman of Brandeis
Round 7 - vs. Henry Kennard of St. John's and the Ohio State tandem of Andras Horanyi and Will Jeter

MEN'S SABRE (sr. Patrick Ghattas and soph. Bill Thanhouser, paired with Detroit's Jaroslaw Jelinek)
Round 5 - vs. Air Force's Michael O'Connor and the Ohio State duo of Mike Momtselidze and Sergey Smirnov
Round 6 - vs. the Penn State pair of Franz Boghicev and Ian Farr, plus Ben Igoe of Rutgers
Round 7 - vs. the St. John's duo of Torian Brown and Luther Clement along with Stanford's Teddy Levitt