him to sword fight, so I thought this would be awesome for him.”
While many young children come in and out of sports well into
adolescence, Rea believes fencing is a sport that stays with a person
forever.
“The one thing that’s really true: it doesn’t matter where you go, if
you go to a fencing club and you’re a fencer, you’re going to imme-diately
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trending
Above: Patrick
O’Malley and
Brennen Fusaro
fence during
a class at the
YMCA. Left:
John Alexander
fences with Greg
Spahr as other
students look on
during a Cape
Fear Fencing
Association day
clinic.
Chris Thomason watched his son flourish in the short six weeks after he
tried his first session. While Caden’s first class was a bit awkward since he
wasn’t acquainted with the heavy gear or mask, he would go home and
practice after each lesson.
“He played soccer and didn’t like that,” Thomason says. “We were try-ing
to find something for him to do. We looked on the YMCA website,
and they had fencing. We thought that’d be really cool. For years, he’s
been watching ‘Star Wars’ and he’s always been asking me how to teach
walk in to a bunch of dedicated, intelligent, happy people,”
he says.
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