St. John's Second After First Day of NCAA Fencing Championships - ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY OFFICIAL ATHLETIC SITE

St. John's Second After First Day of NCAA Fencing Championships


	The St. John's fencing team is in second place after the first day of the 2005 NCAA Championships.

March 17, 2005

Queens, NY - With aspirations to win the University's third NCAA National Championship, the St. John's completed the first day of competition in second place, just seven points behind the lead. The first two days of competition at the four-day event will feature men's competition, and the final two days will feature women's competition.

Ohio State (57) and St. John's (50) - the only teams to qualify the maximum six men's fencers - lead the competition after the day-one bouts, followed by longtime rivals Penn State (47) and Notre Dame (43). St. John's, ranked 10th in the country on the women's side, qualified six entrants on the women's side, along with the Nittany Lions and Irish, while Ohio State has only five entrants.

The 2005 NCAA Championships are being held through Sunday, March 20 at the George Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston. Daily updates from the NCAA Championships, including feature stories on members of the Red Storm fencing teams, will be available on the St. John's Athletics website.

Senior Arpad Horvath (Budapest, Hungary), seeking his third individual title in the epee, and his second in the last two years, is tied for third place, winning 10 of his 14 bouts. Marek Petraszek of Wayne State leads the epee standings (13-1), followed by Notre Dame's Michael Sobieraj (12-2), with three fencers tied at 10-4 (including Horvath, Air Force's Jason Stockdale, Harvard's Julian Rose and Princeton's Soren Thompson)

In the sabre, Sergey Isayenko (Cherkassy, Ukraine), who won the competition as a sophomore, is tied for third place with two other fencers. Penn State newcomer Franz Boghiciv (13-1) is in first place, followed by Ohio State's Jason Rogers (12-2), while Isayenko is in third (11-3 record) with Harvard's Tim Hagaman and Notre Dame's Patrick Ghattas.

In the foil, senior Nitai Kfir (Simtat-Haveredy, Israel) is tied for fourth place, having won 10 of his 14 bouts. Two-time NCAA champion Non Panchan of Penn State leads the foil race (13-1), followed by Penn's Ron Berkowsky (12-2), Ohio State's Boaz Ellis at 11-3, and Kfir is tied for fourth with NYU's Gabe Sinkin).

St. John's enters this year's NCAA Championships off of a sterling performance at the NCAA Northeast Regional, where they qualified 12 fencers (two from each weapon on both the men's and women's sides). The Red Storm were the only team in the country to qualify 12 fencers for the competition.

The National Collegiate Men's and Women's Fencing Championships include individual events in each of the six weapons (women's foil, women's epee, women's sabre, men's foil, men's epee, men's sabre). Fencers will compete in a round-robin of 24 fencers in five-touch bouts. After the round-robin, the top four fencers in each event will fence direct elimination 15-touch bouts for first, second, third and fourth place. Absolute ties for the seeding will be broken as follows: for positions one through three, by a coin toss; for position four, by a fence-off. An institution's place finish in the championships will be based on points earned by each individual. A team will be awarded one point for each victory by its student-athletes for the duration of the championships.