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Ivy League women’s teams won three NCAA fencing titles in the 1980s, with Yale capturing the championship in 1984 and 1985 and the University of Pennsylvania winning in 1986. The 1984 individual champion was Penn’s Mary Jane O’Neill, who won both the individual and team titles in spite of having had little experience before arriving at the university. O’Neill went on to be a member of the 1988 and 1992 U.S. Olympic teams, as well as being both NIWFA and NCAA champions.
Coach Dave Micahnik says O’Neill is the best fencer in Penn’s long tradition. Not only does her reputation persist in the sport, but her image does as well, for she was the model for the Lajos S. Csiszar Trophy, awarded to the Ivy League team champion since 1994. Now a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, following graduation from Harvard Medical School, O’Neill has remained involved with fencing as an official in the Boston area, where she introduces the sport to young people.
The Ivy League’s two other individual NCAA fencing championships in the 1980s were both won by Columbia’s Caitlin Bilodeaux, who emerged with the title in 1985 and again in 1987. A three-time All-American and three-time All-Ivy fencer, Bilodeaux accumulated a 203-9 college record and in her senior year received the George Santelly Memorial Award given to the year’s outstanding U.S. women’s fencer.
Yale’s Andrea Metkus was another instrumental figure in the rise to national prominence of Ivy League women’s fencing. In addition to leading her team to back-to-back NCAA championships in 1984 and 1985, she won the AIAW crown in 1982 and finished second behind O’Neill in the 1984 NCAA individual competition. Together with O’Neill and Bilodeaux, Metkus helped earn national attention and respect for the Ivy League and for women’s fencing.
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