The boys’ and girls’ fencing program at High School South is only three years old, and its coach knew absolutely nothing about the sport until about two-and-a-half years ago.##M:[more]##
But the girls’ squad boasts a 6-1 record, and some team members are heading to the state competition later this season. One of its foil squads, which placed fourth in the District II championships on February 2, will also enjoy a trip to the states.
For Coach George Michalik, who spent 36 years as an engineer with Johnson & Johnson until his retirement seven years ago, his first experience with fencing came when his granddaughter, Briana Nieradka, now a 16-year-old junior at High School South, began fencing two-and-a-half years ago at a summer camp at Princeton Day School.
“She got involved because one of her friends was going over to the program at PDS, and she asked if she could go with her,” Michalik said.
However, it wasn’t just a fluke — Nieradka has the temperament to be a very good fencer, and she has come a long way, he says. In fact, she has come so far along that the two are now more like co-coaches, as they lead the team in its third year of existence.
Taking a glimpse at one of the teams’ practices, one can see Nieradka, an epee fencer, teaching her teammates some of the tricks of the trade.
“She’s kind of taken control of the instruction for the epee squad, both boys and girls,” Michalik says. “In many cases, she’ll take four or five of the fencers and go through the basics with them and start teaching some of them the more advanced skills they need. I can see a difference in them.”
In the District II championships on February 1, South placed fifth overall, with 41 points, beating out Montgomery, Hunterdon Central, High School North, Moorestown Friends, and Pingry. South’s foil squad took third place in the competition, while Nieradka placed fourth in the individual epee and Sharon Gao, with her record of 17-1 in individual matches this year, placed second in the individual foil. For the boys, Alex Guo took second in the individual sabre.
“I attribute this all to getting involved with Briana, and getting to like the sport itself,” he said.
When Nieradka was participating in the PDS program, Michalik would pick her up when it was over. Watching the fencing at that time peaked his interest. When Nieradka entered high school, the fencing program at High School South went from being a club to a varsity-level sport.
Michalik had already met former South fencing coach Ivanka Luchetti, since her husband was the assistant fencing coach at Princeton University, and Nieradka had signed up with him to do some fencing at the YWCA in Princeton.
When Nieradka joined the fencing program at High School South in her freshman year, Michalik started out by giving Luchetti a hand with setting up the strips and doing some of the armory work (fixing some of the weapons). He also helped out during competitions.
At the same time, Michalik had been reading a few books on fencing, and continued going with Nieradka to her evening classes at the YWCA. When Luchetti left (she took a position at Newark Academy) before last season, a number of parents approached Michalik about coaching at South. “Fencing coaches are pretty hard to find,” Michalik says. “There aren’t that many out there.”
After going through the school board, he got the job as the head coach of both the boys’ and girls’ teams. The first year he started, about 64 students applied for the program. By the time everything was settled, there were about 45 students in the program. In the meantime, Nieradka fenced not only at schools, but also some of the tournaments sponsored by the state and by the United States Fencing Association (USFA).
Attending those state competitions with his granddaughter, Michalik spoke to other coaches, and “I found that a lot of them, because of the size of their teams, used their more experienced students to transfer their knowledge onto the less experienced students,” he said. “In essence, that’s what I started doing,” with Nieradka.
Despite the institutional rivalry between North and South, students from both naturally interact with themselves because they come from the same communities, but Nieradka trains and interacts with a lot of the North fencers at the YWCA in Princeton. “Yet the competition is fierce,” he says.
His granddaughter is also known for her calm temperament, never challenging a judgment call, although she will challenge a rule and ask for explanations in a rationale manner. Michalik says he’s proud both as a coach and as a grandfather when he hears comments from others, including the director at the district championships last week, who had some nice comments about her.
This year, Michalik said, 86 students applied for fencing, a testament to the sport’s growing popularity, as the program now has one of the highest numbers of students for any sport within the high school. “I probably have one of the most passionate teams ever seen,” Michalik says. “If you ask me why that is, I don’t know,” he says of his team’s enthusiasm.
That’s a question he is asked a lot, and he says he suspects it’s because a different type of student comes into the sport. “You have to be highly intelligent, you have to have a lot of dexterity, and you have to be thinking two or three steps ahead of your opponent, and try to surmise what they’re going to do, in order to be successful,” he says, comparing the sport to a game of chess. Most of the fencers are in the honors or Advanced Placement courses. “Some of them are very short and slim, and to try to get into a basketball or football squad — it probably wouldn’t be there,” he says. “As far as fencing, they’re very agile, they’re fast, and they’re very intelligent.”
Because so many of the students take advanced courses, Michalik says he takes it easy on those who have papers or big tests to prepare for, letting them skip practice if they need to. In fact, he held off leaving early for a recent match so one of the students on his team could finish taking a two-hour test. “It’s good to be a winner, but it’s also good to be able to be a winner and still hold your own as far as your academics are concerned.”
Michalik also sees his coaching experience as one of the many ways he bonds with his granddaughter, who lives with him in West Windsor. “We go to all the matches together, and we talk about the team at home,” he says. “We can come home and talk about what happened at practice, or what happened at the match.” But the two also do many other things, including ocean kayaking and biking in Maine, he says.
Michalik is one of seven children, with four brothers and two sisters. His father, a chemical worker for E.I. DuPont, came to America from Poland when he was 17 years old. His mother, a supervisor at the Raritan Arsenal in Edison during World War II, was born in America to parents also of Polish descent, and he and his wife Bernadine have two children, including Nieradka’s mother, who is the vice president of operations at McNeil Consumer and Specialty Pharmaceuticals in Fort Washington, PA, and a son, who is a restaurant manager in Scranton, PA. Nieradka, has a 13-year-old brother, John, who attends Grover Middle School.
Michalik says he has never fenced before, and knew nothing about it growing up, but he says the main thing he adds to the team is his management skill, “to be able to use the resources that I have to develop a top-notch team.”
Heading into the rest of the season, Michalik hopes the boys’ team will come out with a winning season, after only winning three matches last year. Currently, the team seems to be on its way with a record of 5-4. He hopes the girls can continue with their strong record. “We have some tough competition coming up, and we’re going to have to step up to it.”
Still, he says, the strong turnout is showing how much interest there really is in the sport. “By accomplishing what we have, we’ve shown we have the capability o
