Making Their Point : 5 Monroe High Swordsmen Will Compete at Prestigious National Fencing Competition

They’re nothing like the flashy Hollywood swashbucklers who swing in on the castle chandelier, rapiers gleaming.

Instead, the students on Monroe High School’s fencing team are the Bad News Bears of the swordsmanship world, a motley group of teens breaking into an elite and expensive sport on a skimpy budget. They have to substitute gardening gloves for fencing gauntlets and borrow pricey gear from opponents at competitions.

But what they lack in equipment they make up for in moxie and raw talent.

In only their second year--their first in official competition against other teams--Monroe’s fencing team has turned out five players who will compete in the United States Fencing Assn.’s national championship next week in Cincinnati, the most prestigious high school fencing event in the country.

“This is our first year [being competitive], and the fact that we’re going to the national competition is very impressive,” said Greg Schiller, the students’ coach.

“It made the other schools kind of wary of us because we really do know how to fence,” Schiller said. “I thought we’d go to tournaments and lose, but in fact we made people take notice of us,” he said.

Although Monroe’s team lost seven of eight matches in its first competitive year, students won fencing matches at key tournaments, which landed them spots at the nationals.

Junior Eric Kelly will compete in the saber competition at the national event, at which Monroe will also field a four-student epee team, juniors Faiyaz Reza and Juan Mejia and sophomores Daniel Galvan and Okalani Nai.

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“In this sport you don’t have to be macho,” said Faiyaz, 17, one of the original team members who started fencing because he thought the sport best suited his thin, 5-foot-11-inch frame.

“It’s about respect,” he said of the sport. “You kill that guy and then you shake hands. There’s no anger there.”

Though it’s not a common sport for high school students, fencing teams are beginning to appear at some schools, albeit mostly private schools--such as Chaminade Preparatory in West Hills or Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City--or public schools with sizable budgets.

Among the cash-strapped public schools of Los Angeles, only Monroe has a fencing team. And that’s because Schiller, a dedicated fencer who got into the sport eight years ago as a student at UC Santa Cruz, pays many of the team’s expenses out of his own pocket.

Schiller, 25, launched the fencing squad as soon as he was hired as biology teacher last year.

He began with seven inquisitive students, teaching them the three common fencing weapons--foil, epee and saber--and the basic steps to parry and retreat. Students practiced two days a week outside Schiller’s classroom, competing only against each other because they were novices and because only a few of them consistently attended practice.

By the end of the year, some students dropped off, some remained and others joined in, intrigued by the strange group of kids lunging and thrusting their arms in the air toward a teacher.

One of the newcomers was Daniel, a lanky, hyper 15-year-old who finds fencing relaxing. “This is always different, it’s always something new because you never know what your opponent is gonna do,” Daniel said.

Juan said he took up the sport because “you get to whack people, you poke people.”

In the squad’s second year, Schiller discovered the six-school Southern California High School Fencing League and enrolled his makeshift team, which had grown to nearly 20 students.

The team had a few wins, but mostly losses. However, it was at the Pacific Coast Championship at Chaminade School in April where the men’s epee team and Kelly won matches that got them to the nationals.

“It’s like playing chess at high speeds,” Schiller explained of fencing. “You’re outthinking your opponent by putting together a group of moves while your opponent is doing the same thing. It’s very complicated sometimes.”

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But the team’s most complicated moves have been aimed at finding money to keep going.

Monroe Principal Joan Elam donated $500 for equipment. Schiller bought enough to outfit a few students for practices. He borrowed the rest from friends or bought used gear.

“More and more, fencing is becoming a rich person’s sport,” Schiller said. “In the old days, if you had a sword and a mask you were a fencer.” Now with electric equipment required for competitions, Schiller said, “You have to buy a starter kit and it’s $120 for a jacket, mask, glove and standard foil [sword], and none of that is electric.”

Electrified equipment allows fencers to compete without actually drawing blood or relying on imperfect judges to determine whose weapon touched an opponent, and where, in the flurry of flashing arms and legs of a fast-moving match. With the competitors wearing vests and carrying swords wired to an electronic device, the victorious fencer’s winning “touch” against an opponent triggers a signal.

Monroe students can trade clothing and gear during practice but in competitions found they sometimes had to ask to borrow their opponents’ electrified outfits.

“It’s kind of weird going up to someone you may see later in a match and asking them for their jacket,” said Daniel. “You almost feel like you lost a point right there.”

For the past two months, the team has been selling chocolate bars and holding bake sales to raise the money to go to Cincinnati. Donations have trickled in, and Schiller is hoping there’ll be enough to cover the more than $1,000 in airline tickets and hotel reservations for the students that he’s already charged on his credit card.

“I’m hopeful,” he said. “But even if we go over our goal, next year we’re still going to run into the problem of trying to get enough money for that electric equipment. I don’t think the guys want to ask around for things again.”