Rutgers presents fencing challenge

Coming off an impressive showing last weekend in victories over Brown, Haverford and Duke, the Penn men's and women's fencing teams will host their second regular-season meet of the season tonight at 7 p.m against Rutgers in the Weightman Gymnasium. Both the men's and women's teams went undefeated last weekend. But tonight the Scarlet Knights will pose a greater threat to the Quakers than did the Bears, Fords or Blue Devils. "The level of competition will definitely be higher than it was last weekend," men's captain Nathan Anderson said. "Rutgers has a really strong team with a lot of depth. But I think our team has more overall talent." The Scarlet Knights will be coming fresh off a meet with Stanford earlier in the afternoon, while the Quakers enter the meet not having fenced competitively since last weekend. However, in a sport, which relies so heavily on the mental side, rest is not necessarily an advantage. "The Rutgers team will be coming into the meet pretty warmed up, so it will be important for us to come out aggressively," Anderson said. The men's sabre team, led by George Kalmar, Sandy Agashiwala and John Demas, will try to pick up where it left off last weekend when it crushed the Duke squad by a score of 9-0. Other Quakers strong spots include the women's epee team, which is coming off a meet where they won their portions of the competition by scores of 11-5 against Duke, 12-4 against Brown and 14-2 against Haverford. The women's foil team, while not as strong overall as the epee team, is led with Megumi Sakae, who was voted the No. 1 fencer in the Ivy League last year and Sarah Johns, who won 11 of her 12 matches in last weekend's meet. Despite the minor psychological edge that the Scarlet Knights may have, Penn is extremely confident. Last weekend, the Quakers' margins of victory were so comfortable that virtually every member of the team got to see action. That development helped to strengthen the team's sense of unity, as all fencers had a chance to contribute.