The Student Recreation Center (SRC) at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) is home to many campus clubs that find themselves practicing countless hours, honing their craft and getting ready for competitions. Many find themselves coming in week after week refining their technique, going over strategy or just finding an excuse to play the sport that they love with friends. Fencing at UCR is no such exception to this as their dedication to their team, love for the game and perseverance in the face of adversity has shaped their journey at UCR.
One of the oldest clubs on campus, Fencing at UCR started in 2012 as explained by Alex Knight, third year computer science with business applications major and club president. Knight described how the club had started as a couple of students who practiced fencing together and formed a club with people in the area. They hired a coach from a local fencing academy and started to build the club, slowly joining competitions and competing with other universities in the Southern California area.
Prior experience is not required, as Vice President Lawrence Wang recounted how he decided to join, “I ended up joining the club after I saw [them] tabling and I found it interesting…I’m a competitive person, so I stuck around.” 
Another club member, Mac Boyd, shared a similar experience: “I had a little fencing experience growing up when I was real young, but I didn’t do it for very long. I ended up joining the club just because it had been something I’d been interested in picking up again. It’s hard to do sports when you’re a little kid. So now that I had gotten older, [it] had been something that I wanted to try. And so I found out UCR had a fencing club, and I was like, well, that sounds fun. I could do that again.”
Boyd, who joined prior to having a coach, explained what their training was like as students, “when I first joined, three years ago, it was pretty much just two dudes who knew a lot about fencing and were definitely competent, but they were students … there’s a couple of techniques that I almost never really used, but I ended up practicing a lot and got decently good at just only because they were favored by these two guys.”
The club has a coach now, who they credited to being able to fill the gaps in their skillset as well as help them practice for their competitions. Both fondly recall how learning with their fellow students helped create a friendly atmosphere that dissolved any awkwardness that might have arisen. 
The club holds most of its meetings on Monday and Wednesday nights, spending the first 20 minutes warming up, followed by drills to refine their technique. The second hour of practice is spent simulating bouts in a competition format.
Fencing at UCR is part of the Intercollegiate Fencing Conference of Southern California (IFCSC). This conference hosts an annual competition with schools such as UC Los Angeles, UC Irvine, UC San Diego and the University of Southern California. The club prepares for this as well as other local competitions in their practices. They often do scrimmages with schools in the area, namely UCI and sometimes host competitions themselves.
Knight explained that competitions have both team and individual formats with victories deciding which school wins over another: “So let’s say there’s three people on your team and three on your opponent’s. Everybody will have a chance to go against everybody. That’s a total of nine bouts, everybody will have a chance to fence everybody. And then you add the points up at the very end … whichever team gets [to] five victories over the other team [first, that team] would win…the actual fencing is done individually, but you work as a team to gain points.”
The club has faced struggles in regards to funding, specifically financing new equipment. In addition to the regular club stipend that the SRC gives competitive sports clubs along with their Associated Students of UCR budget, the club is fundraising more to buy better and safer equipment.
The team is optimistic about the future with goals to have fun and to perform well in competitions. Boyd emphasized that despite their struggles they have a strength in their resourcefulness, “When I first joined the club, we felt very, I don’t know if scrappy is the right word, but we definitely felt like the underdogs in a lot of cases. I went to a competition my very first year here, because we just had so few people. And it was really kind of a sight. We all went to UCLA, and every other team with them had a coach. All of their equipment was super shiny and polished.”
She continued, “We didn’t have a coach, we didn’t have any of this stuff and we didn’t win, but we held our own in a lot of bouts, and we did pretty well. I think what’s kind of unique about UCR fencing is that even though we do have a coach now and a lot of our equipment is in a lot better shape now, we’ve kind of got this legacy in … we know how to do more with less, right?”
