July has been a quiet month for us but August and September promise to be busy!

Firstly - good luck to everyone headed off to President's Cup in Christchurch this weekend! President's Cup is the second of four national open events in the fencing calendar.

Another event that lots of you will have heard about is the Commonwealth Veteran Fencing Championships - and entries are now open. So far there has been heaps of international interest and we are expecting a lot of competition, especially from the Aussies. We're really excited that this event is in New Zealand and the team in Christchurch are doing a great job getting ready for it. To be eligible to compete you need to be 40+ or turning 40 before the end of the year (ie - 11:59pm on 31st December 2016!). Find out more on the tournament website: http://www.cvfc2016.co.nz/

In local affairs our Secondary School Teams event is about to kick off. This runs over the first three weekends in August (6th, 13th, 20th) with Foil split across the first and third weekends and Epee + Sabre in the middle weekend. If your school doesn't have a fencing team you can enter to be part of a composite team. Check out the event page for details: https://www.fencingnorth.com/events-rankings/competitions/394/fencing-north-secondary-school-circuit-2016-teams. Entries close on the 1st August but we will accept late entries through till the 3rd August.

Coming up shortly after the Secondary School Teams are the National Secondary School Championships (3rd-4th September). This is one of the highlight tournaments of the year for us and we get a great set of fencers competing from all around NZ (for a refresher of last year's event - check this article from the Western Leader). At this point the entry form isn't published but all the event information is, check it out here: https://www.fencingnorth.com/events-rankings/competitions/396/new-zealand-secondary-school-championships-2016

We'd also like to congratulate the fencers who competed recently at the Australian U15 & U17 Fencing Championships! Lots of good results all around. Special mention to Lena Jacob on placing 3rd in the U15 Girls Foil! Also well done to those who placed in the team matches! (Nicholas Miehlbradt 3rd= U17 Boys Epee Teams, Oliver Zou & Alex McGuire-Barnes 3rd= U15 Boys Foil Teams, Lena Jacob & Chantelle May & Hannah Irwin 3rd= U15 Girls Foil Teams). 

A results correction to make - at the conclusion of the Individual Finals of the Secondary School Circuit we announced that Auckland Grammar School were the Top Boys School for 2016 edging out Kristin by one point. After recalculating this we found that we made a mistake and actually Kristin beat Auckland Grammar School by one point - it doesn't get much closer than this!  Congratulations to Kristin School on being the Top Boys School in the Individual Circuit. 

Happy Fencing,
Fencing North