Penn State will not be holding its quad meet today (vs. St. John's, Duke and Temple), due to travel issues with some of the other teams. That's too bad, because it would have been great to see some matchups between elite fencers – particularly in women's sabre, with Duke's Becca Ward, PSU's Caity Thompson and Monika Askamit, and Dagmara Wozniak of St. John's (all four are national-team caliber sabreists). We're fairly certain that Ward has lost only twice this season in college team events, with those losses coming to Thompson and Penn's Danielle Kamis (both at the Princeton Duals).
It doesn't seem like we have been able to measure Penn State's team much this season (in dual-meet scenarios), as the PSU men have fenced only 15 matches (12-3) while the women will head into the postseason following a 13-1 regular season. The Nittany Lions also do not compete in a "conference tournament" event (such as the IFAs or MFCs), so they have only one event remaining – the NCAA Mid-Atlantic/South Regional (March 7) – before serving as the host team for the NCAA Championships (March 19-22).
We've been meaning to mention that we did solve one mystery involving the Penn State men, from their 17-10 loss to Penn at the Princeton Duals (that match took on less significance, for PSU but certainly not for Penn, when the Nittany Lions men lost a couple weeks later to both Notre Dame and Ohio State).
Anyway, Penn won all but one of the men's foil bouts that day (8-1), and it was noted that PSU was missing a pair of top performers in that weapon (All-American Nick Chinman and elite newcomer Miles Chamley-Watson, who was competing in Paris at a World Cup event). There was no official explanation about why Chinman did not fence in those foil bouts ... but a few weeks later we learned that Chinman had been shifted to epee, we believe in all of the matches at Princeton (Chinman had been a standout in both foil and epee, during his youth fencing days).
(In the future, CF360 will take a closer glance at other weapon sheets in such situations!)
One can only assume that Penn State's various top fencers have completed enough qualifying bouts to earn spots in the Regional. Chinman, Chamney-Watson (and possibly Askamit, who may have missed an event to attend a World Cup?) already had totaled a lower number of bouts (in their primary weapons) than many of their teammates. CF360 has an NCAA handbook that could be referenced for all the technical mumbo-jumbo, but again the assumption is that the PSU fencers are good-to-go for the Regionals (if not, there appears to be a provision for teams to request a waiver of minimum requirements for Regional participation).
With today's schedule opened up, the CF360 blog will try to pass on some other content during the day (the editor also will be focusing more today on CF360's sister site, CollegeBaseball360.com).