An Important Question to Start with: Why Do You Fence?

We’ve written about this important topic in a previous article, but it’s essential to understand your motivations when you are picking your school.

If you can articulate the single most important reason why fencing is in your life, it will help guide both how you make your decision about which colleges to consider and where you ultimately will go. I strongly encourage you to think deeply about this because you might be surprised by what you discover.

Michael Aufrichtig, head coach of Columbia University fencing, summarizes this nicely:

“I found that the most successful college athletes are the ones that just love the sport. If someone doesn't love the sport and know why they are doing it, it can be very difficult for them when they're in college. Two years ago, one of the things that we stressed within our team was, ‘What's your why?’ Everybody fences for different reasons. Some people love winning, and although it can hurt them if they're losing, at least that's why they get up in the morning. For others, their ‘why’ is that they enjoy the game or the physicality of it. If it's because your parents are pushing you, you're not going to last. You'll quit.”

My own college decision revealed a lot more to me than I expected. After freshman year in high school, when people would ask me where I wanted to go to college, my goal was Columbia University in New York.

This goal was born out of a several key factors. The first was that education was very important to my family, and I can not remember a time when I was not focused on going to the best college that I could get into. Where I went, however, was especially important to my father, Chuck Rogers. He is originally from western New York, and his goal was to attend Cornell University in Ithaca. Despite his high marks, this was a big stretch for him and my grandparents because they couldn’t afford the tuition. Nevertheless, in his senior year, he applied for a scholarship, but was devastated to find out that he finished second place to a friend and classmate. He went on to attend a small regional college, Alfred University, for his undergraduate degree, and later did a Master’s Degree at St. Mary’s University. When I was younger, I would listen to him talk about his college experiences and feel compelled to have the experience that he was not able to. And so the “Ivy League” was my conception of what would be right for me. The second factor was the geographic significance of New York City. At 15-16 years old, I was just starting to perform well at a senior national level, and many of the athletes I competed against directly and admired (Keeth Smart, Ivan Lee, Akhi Spencer-El, Herby Raynaud, to name a few) were training with the Peter Westbrook Foundation (at the Fencer’s Club) in NYC. I could see even then the importance of training with the best, and so Columbia seemed like the perfect combination of “Ivy League” academics and elite fencing training.

With that criteria deeply embedded in my mind, my college decision didn’t seem that complicated. I would apply to Columbia as my first choice, but also apply to other schools like Stanford and University of Pennsylvania so that I could keep my options open in the event that I wasn’t accepted. I also applied to The Ohio State University (OSU) out of respect to Vladimir Nazlymov, whom I had trained with at summer fencing camps in Kansas City since I was a very young fencer, even though I had no real intention of going there.

When spring rolled around, I was delighted to find out that I had been accepted to Columbia and all of the other fencing schools that I had applied to. It should have been a no brainer, right? Well, something in me made me hesitate before I signed on the dotted line. Instead of immediately returning my Letter of Intent, I took the maximum amount of time to reflect deeply on ‘why’ I wanted to fence in college and what I hoped to achieve.

It was about this time that the Olympics began orbiting in my mind. It’s hard to explain, but before that, it had never seriously considered that maybe I could fence in the Olympics. I began to ask, in earnest, important questions like “Am I good enough?” and “What and who would I need to make that happen?” After many discussions with my coach, Daniel Costin, my parents, and careful consideration, my goals expanded and the criteria of my college decision began to change. You might think “Columbia is a perfect place to train because, as you already pointed out, you have New York fencing on your doorstep.” And you would be right, but something just didn’t feel right. I had this gnawing feeling that New York City wasn’t the right environment for me personally. I was pretty sure that the clash and tumble of the city might swallow me whole, or at least serve as an unavoidable distraction.

At around the same time, I paid a courtesy visit to Vladimir in Columbus to try to, at least, understand what OSU had to offer. After a 4-hour lunch, and a comically long speech from Vladmir (of which my mother, to this day, claims she understood no more than 50%), I knew in my gut that he truly believed in me and could help me achieve my Olympic dream. I also began to understand that the focused training environment and athletic resources that Ohio State could offer me would be my best option to accomplish my newly identified and single most important goal: Becoming an Olympian. And so, in the 11th hour, I made my final decision to leave my childhood dream of attending Columbia behind, take ownership of my “why” and prepare myself to for 4-5 years in Columbus, Ohio.