title of epic proportion

No matter what the sport, whether it’s a team sport like football or cricket, or an individual sport, like boxing, biathlon, or in my case, fencing, having a team and having good team dynamics are very important. It’s a very common misconception than many people have; including myself at one point that if you do an individual sport you don’t have to have much team interaction apart from training together. I can confirm from my many years in fencing, and more specifically my recent involvement in the national team that teamwork is still a huge component of performing well regardless of if you compete together side by side or not.

When I was about eight years old, I tried out fencing for a year at a club by my house. It was fun, but maybe not exactly “my thing”. The next year, I signed up for my community basketball team. That could be “my thing”. Boy was I wrong! We’d play games every couple of weekends against other teams. I touched the ball maybe twice that season. Since then I hated team sports. I needed something where I control everything. I needed something where if I mess up and it all turns into Chernobyl, only I am to blame. After partaking in a Mini U camp in which fencing was involved, I decided to turn back to fencing, but this time in a different discipline. I then spent the first three quarters of my fencing career still believing with absolute certainty that fencing, being an individual sport, was strictly individual and the “team” was just for training with.

As the years progressed and I started to get more involved in the sport, I started to realize just how wrong I had been. The first example of me seeing the extent of teamwork in fencing was at the National Championships in Saskatoon in 2012 where I participat...

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...op sixteen, finishing in ninth place. I think that that is plenty of proof that despite being an individual sport, having a team behind you in fencing, or any individual sport for that matter, is still a very important factor to succeeding in sport. That being said, I’d like to finish off by saying a big “thank you” to all my teammates from the Cavalier Fencing Club, Manitoba Golden Blades, and all my other friends from team Canada for being there for me and cheering for me at every competition, from local competitions to World cups. Always cheering for me, even when I’m down eleven points in a bout to fifteen, my teammates have taught me that in one of the very few cases ever, I was wrong and that in fact despite it all being up to me to choose the right actions to do, my team is one of my most important assets and that without a team, we can’t get very far at all.