Taking It to the Hilt

Two years ago, Juan Capdet III was competing in sports familiar to most American boys.

“I was in that baseball-basketball stage,” Capdet said.

Then he met Father Lawrence Calhoun, fencing coach at Chaminade High, and Capdet veered in a new athletic direction faster than you can say “En garde!”

Let others play with a ball. Capdet wanted to parry and thrust.

The Chaminade sophomore has company at school.

Thanks largely to the tireless efforts of Calhoun, Chaminade boasts one of the state’s top high school fencing programs. Calhoun expects all but two of his 18 fencers to compete in the Junior Pacific Coast Section championships today and Sunday at Chaminade.

The event draws fencers from across California and Nevada in a showdown for berths in the national championships, June 8-16 in Cincinnati. Calhoun expects about 230 fencers to compete in four age divisions broken into three classes of weapons--foil, epee and sabre.

Chaminade junior Maya Madrigal ranks among the best female competitors, though her status for this weekend’s event was uncertain because of illness.

Madrigal said fencing draws a different athlete, one interested in more than the physical aspect of athletics. The cerebral side of Chaminade’s fencers is reflected in the team’s cumulative 3.6 grade-point average.

“I like the finesse and tradition of fencing. . . . The intensity of trying to kill somebody without really killing them,” Madrigal said, laughing.

Madrigal excelled against her competition in the Southern California High School Fencing League this season, recently winning the girls’ individual epee title. Regional teams in the league, which is sanctioned by the U.S. Fencing Assn. but is not affiliated with the California Interscholastic Federation, include Monroe and Harvard-Westlake.

Chaminade won the boys’ three-man epee and foil titles--the Eagles do not field a sabre team--and the girls’ teams finished second to Victor Valley in both weapons. Individually, Eagle junior Isaac Di Ianni won the boys’ epee title and Capdet was second. Foil honors went to Harvard-Westlake’s Cameron Hill, who is considered the best fencer in the area. Chaminade senior Brook Schaaf, the team captain, finished second in foil.

Calhoun started coaching fencing at the school in 1987 and has nurtured the program through good times and bad. The junior-dominated Eagles finally made strides this season after two years of losing and learning.

“This year they’re finally clicking,” said Calhoun, 60, a Roman Catholic priest who teaches at Notre Dame High.

“It takes three years to learn what is going on. Now when we go to a tournament, I expect them to stick around. Now we have to wait. But it’s a happy wait. We used to go and get knocked out right away.”

Out of their dashing white uniforms, several of Chaminade’s fencers could be mistaken for basketball players. Junior Dom Yarnell is 6 feet 6; Scott Gabler, a junior who is captain of the foil team, is 6-4, and Di Ianni is 6-3.

“It’s a progression of giants,” Calhoun said.

It is also the most-talented group of fencers Calhoun has coached since 1993, when Chaminade sent four seniors to the college ranks. The top three fencers from that class--Wes Waldron, Jeff Feinblatt and Dean Jacobberger--are juniors at Penn State and have helped the Nittany Lions win the past two NCAA fencing titles.

On this year’s team, Capdet, Schaaf and Conrad Olmedo, the school’s junior class president, have national rankings with the U.S. Fencing Assn.

Capdet, in particular, seems to have a hunger to compete. The 15-year-old has fenced nearly 300 matches since the start of the season in September and leads Chaminade with 174 victories. He already has qualified for the national championships in Division II epee based on his finish in a U.S. Fencing Assn. competition earlier this month at Chaminade.

“By the end of the season, I want to have 200 wins,” said Capdet, who is left-handed but fences right-handed. “Last year I barely had 50.”

Capdet, who enjoys the sport’s split-second action, says he would like to attend University of Notre Dame. Capdet attended a fencing camp last summer in Indiana and visited Notre Dame’s campus. One of the camp’s instructors was Yves Auriol, who coached the Fighting Irish to an NCAA runner-up finish this year.

Having one of his fencers attend Notre Dame would suit Calhoun just fine. He graduated from the university in 1959 and earned his master’s degree there.

Calhoun became involved in fencing by chance. While working on his master’s in 1964, he set out one day to watch a track meet on the Notre Dame campus. There was no track meet, but Calhoun stumbled across a fencing competition.

Intrigued, he became the fencing team’s chaplain for two years and eventually asked for a lesson from the coach.

After earning his master’s in 1966, Calhoun went to work as a teacher at Notre Dame High in Niles, Ill., a Chicago suburb, and started a fencing club at the school. He sought instruction from a coach at a local YMCA and later began attending international fencing camps at Cornell University. That led to an invitation from a French coach in 1974 to travel abroad, where Calhoun learned the finer points of fencing.

That summer, Calhoun was made an honorary member of Masque de Fer, a French fencing club. The Chaminade team goes by the same name, which means “iron mask.”

Despite his extensive training, Calhoun has competed in only one fencing match, when a participant was needed to fill out a high school meet in Chicago.

Calhoun was good enough to produce an Olympian. Tim Glass, who learned fencing under Calhoun at Notre Dame High in Illinois, was a member of national championship teams at University of Notre Dame in 1976-77 and made the U.S. team that boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

Among Calhoun’s other achievements is starting the Junior Olympics for fencing, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in February.

Calhoun says he can see himself coaching until 2001. That’s when Derek Snyder, Chaminade’s seventh-grade prodigy, will be a senior.

In the meantime, the veteran coach will continue prodding and encouraging participation in a sport that operates in the shadows of football, basketball and baseball.

“You can’t learn it by reading about it in a book,” he said. “You’ve got to go out there and do it, study it, be a philosopher.

“It really is a holistic sport.”

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Fencing Facts

Rules for the sport’s three weapons:

* Epee--Points are scored when a sword touch is made on any part of an opponent’s body. It is considered the dueling sword. “You want to hit the hand, the arm, any of the extremities,” said Father Lawrence Calhoun, Chaminade’s coach. “I always say the epee is like the cobra and the mongoose--back and forth, very quick and very fast and very cerebral. Everything is a target.”

* Foil--Points are scored when a sword touch is made on an opponent’s lame, a vest with metallic thread that covers the entire torso except the neck.

* Sabre--Same rules as foil, except the lame starts at the waist. “The primary striking area is the head,” Calhoun said. “Visualize ‘Braveheart.’ ”

Note: All sword touches are recorded by electronic equipment.