Phoenix Fencing Academy brings unique sport to Valley

TEMPE – One thought his association with Luke Skywalker meant he was destined to be a fencer. Another became addicted to the sport after watching a children’s TV show starring the actors for “The Tingling Brothers Circus.”

The athletes that step through the doors of Phoenix Fencing Academy start out in the sport for a variety of reasons, and quite a few leave as champions.

Fencing may not be the first sport that people think of when it comes to the Olympics – basketball, swimming, track and field or any of the martial arts like wrestling or boxing get more recognition.

This often leaves fencing on the sidelines of discussion, and despite its lack of mainstream popularity, participating athletes must possess far more skill than athletics, making it one of the more technical sports.

One of Arizona’s most successful connections to sports is the Phoenix Fencing Academy. Owner, Founder and Trainer Will Becker III founded the Academy with his wife Sabrina in 2018 after his father Bill, also an established fencing coach, moved to Florida and closed the previous school in the area.

“We decided to open our own facility to continue working with the children in Arizona and wanted to sort of come up with our own under our own name and our own separate brand,” Becker said.

The academy opened five years ago and has already seen tremendous success from its students at national and international levels. But for Becker, fencing training wasn’t something he ever expected to be a full-time job.

“I started coaching as a job at that time so I could make money. And honestly, when I did that, some of the kids I coached started getting pretty good. Then I started to get a little more interested in it,” Becker said.

Three of Becker’s most successful students are Luke Linder, a junior at Notre Dame, Jackson McBride a sophomore at Columbia University, and Gillian Harrill, a former Cornell graduate student.

Linder’s path to fencing was paved by a demonstration he saw at school at the age of 7 and immediately fell in love with the sport.

“Seven years old, I loved Star Wars, you know, my name was Luke, that just nailed the whole narrative. And so I told my parents that you have to sign me up for it,” Linder said.

Although he was still a year too young to start fencing (he had to be 8), Linder’s mother signed him up for the sport the following year and he “never looked back”.

This proved to be the right choice as Linder is credited with being Becker’s first student to succeed, winning the Y12 and Y14 national championships and representing the USA in over 10 events around the world.

Additionally, the Chandler native won the 2021 NCAA men’s singles saber national championship. His sister Kara, a Notre Dame student, won the women’s individual national championship in saber the same day shortly before Luke’s final bout, making her the only sibling national champion in collegiate fencing.

“I’m like, ‘Okay, I have to do this for the family. There’s a lot of people I have to do this for,'” Linder said. “It was a lot of motivation, not pressure. It was a great experience. And I hope we can do that again.”

Luke and Kara have one last chance to become two-time sibling national champions when the NCAA men’s and women’s fencing championships begin Thursday in Durham, North Carolina. Notre Dame will also be aiming for its third straight national title.

Luke is also the fifth-ranked junior fencer in the world and second-ranked in the United States, meaning a chance to make the Olympic team is a very real possibility for the Notre Dame fencer.

“I was a little bit close in the race for Tokyo (2020 Olympics),” Linder said. “It’s always been like that, it’s as high as you can’t afford. It’s such a great honor. But yeah, it’s definitely on the horizon and it’s definitely an opportunity you can’t really turn down.”

Harrill is another national champion whose fencing roots stretch back to the Phoenix Fencing Academy. Harrill, also a Chandler native, attended Cornell University and won the 2017 women’s Division IA national championship in singles saber.

“It was pretty intense. I think the hardest thing was fencing my teammate in the final because we were really good friends. And you still have to be able to compete against someone you love very much, and they know you really well, and you know them really well,” Harrill said of Kaitlyn Becker, her Finals competitor and Will’s younger sister.

“It’s really hard to defend someone when you both know each other’s tricks because we’ve probably boxed each other off every day. And suddenly it’s the difference between a gold and a silver medal in the finals,” she said.

Harrill looks back fondly on her time at Phoenix Fencing Academy and says she has great respect for Becker both as a trainer and as a life mentor.

“I saw Will more times than I saw my own dad in high school,” Harrill said, laughing. “Will was definitely like a father figure where he gave advice, even outside of fencing. He always tells me the truth. He doesn’t sugarcoat anything and always believed in me.”

Even after she left college fencing, Harrill stayed connected to the fencing world even after taking the leap of faith and moving to New York City with no job or apartment. There she met a friend and got a job teaching fencing at a local high school and club.

“I didn’t realize how much fencing as a network, even if I didn’t compete, would help me in my career or at least my livelihood. Because suddenly I was on the other side of fencing and it felt really interesting to coach someone against a coach I knew who had known me since I was 12 and suddenly be treated like an equal,” Harrill said .

Another successful product of the academy, McBride had by far the most interesting path into the sport, but one worthy of a few laughs.

“I got into fencing through an episode of a show called iCarly, ‘The Fencin’ Bensons,'” McBride said. “And I asked my parents to sign me up and they said if you find one in Arizona [a place to fence] we take you and i did so they took me and i enjoyed it.”

Released in 2008, this episode of a children’s TV show sparked McBride’s ten-plus year fencing career during which he represented the United States on the international stage, where he won an individual bronze medal at the 2019 Junior World Cup in Sosnowiec in the saber and multiple other team medals internationally Level.

Despite his success, McBride’s early years were mentally very tough for him. Especially seeing another local fencer achieve national success with another club in the area.

“I sat there, I would like to say, three years. I just thought I wasn’t doing so well. Then we saw that Luke Linder was doing really well in Arizona, too, and putting two and two together, that club has produced really good fencers,” McBride said of the Phoenix Fencing Academy. “And finally my parents let me go and they said, ‘Yeah, that’s a really good coach.'”

McBride, currently a sophomore at Columbia University in New York, has just completed his second season in collegiate fencing after finishing ninth at the NCAA Northeast Regional in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has two years left to play .

Like Harrill, McBride has a very high opinion of his fencing coach and refers to Becker as “family” or “elder brother”, descriptions Linder also used when speaking of the man who introduced her to the fencing family.

“It started out almost like an older brother that’s so easy to bond with,” Linder said of Becker. “And it’s not just for me, it’s like all the kids in the club, you know. He really tries to make it fun for everyone and he does. It’s amazing how he can captivate such a young audience and just motivate them to do well.”

Despite these three successful fencers coming out of the academy, they are the outliers in all of Arizona as the fencing community in the Valley as a whole is not very large.

“As far as competitive sport goes, Arizona doesn’t have a lot of competitive fencing, but there is a little bit. As for fencing in Arizona, my goal is to raise the competitive level of the sport here,” said Becker.

Becker also wants to expand his club across the valley because he feels the region as a whole needs more competition to develop better fencers.

“There’s a bit of other Saber happening in the Phoenix metro area, but not much. And that makes it pretty difficult to develop your own program when you have to send 7-, 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds to compete in California. Parents essentially want to pay for that upfront, which I totally understand,” Becker said.

Despite the difficulty of developing a program, Becker has done a great job and has produced an NCAA National Champion and multiple international and national medalists. But there are other goals to achieve, and Becker believes the sky’s the limit for his students.

“I have high goals, you know, I want to send fencers to the Olympics, we’ve had some that have come close. Of course I want to be national champion at all levels,” said Becker. “We’ve achieved some of those goals, but we’re not done yet.”