Fencers from Yorktown-based club making a splash on national stage
Tucked away next to a strip mall on George Washington Memorial Highway is a square, white building that one might miss at first glance.
For nearly 365 days of the year, athletes inside that building are hard at work, practicing a sport relatively as unheralded in Yorktown as the building itself: fencing.
“Yorktown is not that big,” head coach Miracle Qi said. “So we only have (our) little group.”
Though the fencing community in the area isn’t big, the Miracle Fencing Club made a big splash this summer at the USA Fencing National Championships in Minneapolis. One of Qi’s students, Siwen Liao, took home one of the competition’s top honors: the Div.-3 Women’s Saber national championship.
For Liao, who will start her senior year at Grafton High in a few weeks, winning a national title was the culmination of a difficult year.
“It felt good just because this season I’ve had a lot of plateaus,” she said. “It’s nice to finally break through that.”
“She’s been playing for it. She’s given a lot of years to this sport,” said Qi. “... I want to bring her to go to that level. I don’t want to break her dreams. So we keep going and that’s the final result, I feel like a dream has happened. ... It’s hard to explain how happy I was for Siwen.”
Like most of the athletes at Miracle Fencing Club, Liao has been fencing since she was a kid, with Qi coaching her every step of the way. In addition to Qi, coaches Terra Walker, William Fenker and Peter Souders help train the roughly 40 students in the club.
Liao originally got into fencing thanks to her parents, who heard about Qi’s club through the Chinese community in the area. Qi spent several years as a fencer on the Chinese national team.
Alexandria Fan, another of Qi’s students, placed sixth in the Y-10 Women’s Saber competition at the national championships, earning a spot on the youth national team that will head to the 2022 Pan American Games in Lima, Peru, later this month.
Fan, who is going into fifth grade at Providence Elementary School, is also Qi’s daughter, representing one of the many family connections that make up Miracle Fencing Club.
Liao’s younger brother, Sirui, is another fencer at the club, and was in Minneapolis for the national championships along with several other club members.
For Qi, it was a long two weeks as she spent all day, every day at the championships with her students at different events. When she did get an afternoon off, she took her family to see the Mall of America, the largest mall in the western hemisphere, a trip that she really enjoyed.
“I also forgot a little bit about the tournament, what’s going on or stress,” she said. “The nice day [gets] better because you go out then go in again, [feeling] fresh.”
Fencing competitions take place periodically throughout the year, with competitors traveling around the country to take part. With training almost every day of the week, it’s a big time commitment for the fencers, who help motivate and push each other constantly.
“Even if fencing is an individual sport, we’re still a team,” Liao said. “At one competition, I may be standing on the podium, but in another competition, somebody else may be on the podium. Regardless, I think we feel proud. Just because we train with each other and we see how hard we work and the sacrifices we make.
“At the end of the day, even though I’m the one [being interviewed], that doesn’t mean my teammates didn’t work just as hard.”
Sian Wilkerson, sian.wilkerson@pilotonline.com, 757-342-6616
