Our Coaches!
Hongyun, Yuanjing and their daughter Luona arrived on December 20, 1998 to a big welcome by members of the Birmingham Fencing Club! Thanks to Senator Richard Shelby for helping us get our new coaches here as quickly as possible. We also want to thank our sponsors for their help in getting our coaches settled into their new home.
There is no way to exaggerate the abilities of our coaches. Several people outside the Club have said that Hongyun and Yuanjing are two of the best coaches in the United States. We have seen the quality of fencing in Birmingham rise sharply over the last few years, and we have recently seen our first 'A' ranked Birmingham fencer. Our youth program has been especially successful. We have several youth fencers competing at the national level, quite a few on the national points list. We have hosted several youth tournaments. These are just some of the many innovative steps the Club has taken to build one of the finest programs in the country.
Prior to joining the Birmingham Fencing Club, Sun Hongyun was a Chinese National Fencing Team coach (also coach for the Tianjin Fencing Club). As a competitor in foil and epee, she has earned a long list of national and international medals including a 7th individual and a 5th team place in the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. Hongyun holds a degree in fencing and has been a coach for over 12 years.
Wang Yuanjing was also a Chinese National Fencing Team coach (also head coach for the Tianjin Fencing Club). As a competitor in foil, he earned a long list of national medals, including Chinese National Foil Champion. He has an advanced degree in fencing and has been a coach for over 20 years. Coach Wang is an internationally rated director. He refereed in the 1992 and 1996 Olympic Games, as well as in the 1992 modern pentathlon.
They also have a terrific fifteen-year-old daughter Luona (she was named after the Barcelona games, where Yuanjing was working as a referee when Luona was born). Luona is a nationally ranked women's foil fencer in the U.S.
The Birmingham Fencing Club is just over ten years old. We had struggled for four years to build a program with no coach, and with only the hope of attracting a qualified coach in the future. Then a friend of Hongyun and Yuanjing (Daniel Xu from Louisville) posted a notice on the rec.sport.fencing newsgroup, stating that friends of his planned to immigrate to the U.S. soon and where looking for a club. We responded with very little hope of getting them to come here. After learning about their qualifications it seemed even more unlikely. We then sent an email directly to Hongyun and Yuanjing, first listing every reason why they should not come to Birmingham, followed by our vision of what was possible here. It soon became apparent that we shared the same goals and ideas for fencing in Birmingham and the Southeast. All of our discussions were by email. After narrowing their choices to 10 programs, they chose Birmingham in August, 1998. We later learned that our coaches received nearly 200 responses to the initial posting on the fencing newsgroup.
Our plans from this point are ambitious, but it would be foolish to speculate aloud. Of course, we sincerely do not believe this could have happened without the support of you and others that competed in our tournaments. We hope to reward that support by continuing to improve the quality of our events.
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