As mentioned briefly last night (in a quick posting filed from Midway Airport's Concourse A), the significance of "travel partners" during NCAA Championship bouting can vary greatly. Some fencers likely would perform the same regardless of who is fencing with them. Others perform better if their college teammate is in the same travel group. And certainly others can get a boost from the quality of a non-teammate(s) in their group. That last scenario could have been the case in men's sabre (with defending champ Jeff Spear being Columbia's only entry in that weapon), but there are only seven pairs of teammates competing in men's sabre and thus Spear ended up in the one group ("H") with fencers from three different schools (meaning that he will not be fencing alongside fencers from one of the top contenders for the team title, which would have been the case if he was paired with the sabre duos from ND, PSU, OSU or even St. John's).
Here's some other quick notes on the travel-partner setup (epee and sabre travel-group analysis to follow):
• MEN'S FOIL – There are nine pairs of teammates among the 24 entrants in this weapon, forcing one set of teammates to be split up. That unfortunate duo is Brown's NCAA tournament veteran Adam Pantel and Jonathan Yu – which, on the face of things, should have minimal impact. However, Pantel has been placed into a group with Columbia's super duo (All-American Kurt Getz and '09 Northeast Regional champ Sherif Farrag). Pantel's unorthodox style could help to distract and/or frustrate fencers from the opposing group, possibly helping the Columbia pair pick up a few extra wins over the course of their respective 23 bouts in the two days of round-robin.
In terms of the other foilists from the top contenders, Notre Dame's freshman phenoms (Gerek Meinhardt and Enzo Castellani ) are grouped with a fencer – NYU veteran Alexander Kao – who might be one of the biggest wildcards among all 145 fencers at this event. Kao was somewhat of a forgotten commodity heading into this season, in terms of looking at foilists around the nation who previously had competed in the NCAAs. He had an impressive rookie season way back in 2004-05, placing 7th at the Northeast Regional and 17th at the NCAAs (held that year in Houston, interestingly the year that ND rallied to nip OSU for the title). Kao failed to return to the NCAAs as a sophomore in 2006, then was studying in France as a junior ('07 season) and took a year off from school during the 2007-08 academic year. Now he's back and is coming off an impressive runner-up finish at the Northeast Regional that clinched his spot in the championship field (he entered the regional as the #8 seed). If Kao can stay hot this week, that could provide an unexpected boost for the ND rookies who are getting their first taste of NCAA Championship fencing.
The Ohio State foilists (two-time NCAA champion Andras Horanyi and surging Collin Sutter) also could benefit through fencing alongside four-time NCAA entrant Will Friedman of Brandeis. Friedman failed to finish in the top-20 at the '06 and '07 NCAAs, but he's coming off an All-America finish (7th) in 2008. Penn State's Nick Chinman and Miles Chamley-Watson are paired with Princeton's Alexander Mills – so it will be interesting to see how that works, with Chinman an NCAA veteran and All-American while the other two are coming off strong freshman seasons but still are embarking on their first NCAA Championship appearances.