The strong competitive nature of the Ivy League Championship this past weekend propelled the Bulldogs to compete like they have never before, earning a record-breaking 195.400. Their past highest team score was 195.325 in 2018, showing that the smallest tweaks such as a pointed toe versus a flexed one, can make history. The Bulldogs came in 2nd place, behind Penn by 0.400 points and ahead of Cornell and Brown.

“The Ivy Classic is always a fun meet, where everybody’s competitive, especially this year,” head coach Andrew Leis said to the News. “It was a nail-biter pretty much all the way to the end, so we were excited to see the results. And obviously, all that hard work paid off. It was a big moment for us to celebrate because after 51 years of Yale gymnastics, this team [team 51] now has the highest team score in program history.”

The Bulldogs fought for those extra tenths of a point throughout the whole meet, especially on the uneven bars and vault. 

The daunting vault proved to be no challenge for the gymnasts at this meet as they tied their past program record on vault with a 48.8 team score on the event. Powerhouse Ella Tashjian ’27 tied for first in the event with a 9.825.

Leis called the uneven bar rotation a “big momentum swing” in the meet, because they were able to hit all 6 out of 6 bar routines. In fact, they swept the podium on the event, claiming the first, second and fourth place spot on the event with Sarah Wilson ’24, Lily Aucoin ’27 and Sherry Wang’s ’24 routines, respectively. 

Going into their last event of the day, the balance beam, the team knew they were on the way to make history. So, when there was a fall in the middle of their beam line up, the remaining gymnasts in the line-up didn’t budge, landing every skill on those four inches of wood. 

“They did a really good job of keeping their composure and every routine at that point counted,” Leis said. “We had a lot of stuck landings, which, in the end, was the difference maker whether or not we were going to break that record.”

Emma Mangiacapre ’24 was part of the reason the Bulldogs stayed solid on the beam, scoring a whopping 9.825. 

The Bulldogs still have a lot of fire left in them for the rest of the season. Looking forward, Leis said that the team is “still hungry,” especially with some of their biggest competitions on the way. 

Specifically, this weekend the Bulldogs will go against strong competitors, the University of Maryland as well as the University of New Hampshire at home. On their first day back in the gym post-Ivy Classic the gymnasts agreed that for the next four weeks of their season, Leis said they were going to “give 110 percent” to finish off the season “really strong.”

“We’ve known at the start of preseason that this team was special, and we thought that they were capable of putting up a really solid number if they went in and kind of did their job,” Leis said. “So obviously in a big pressure situation, big moment, it was a big accomplishment for them.”

The gymnasts will celebrate the team’s seniors at this weekend’s home meet against Maryland, University of New Hampshire and Southern Connecticut State University on Sunday. 

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Two weeks ago, the Elis posted a season-high team score of 194.675 against Penn, their highest team score since 2022. This was their first “zero falls” meet, wherein not a single gymnast’s routine with a fall was counted in their entire line-up. Although the Bulldogs had promising scores, they fell to the Quakers. The following weekend, the gymnasts fell slightly short again against the Bears, but still managed to earn a team score of 192.900, more than a point above their team score against Brown last season (191.850). 

“We don’t focus too much on scores, we’re just trying to hit our routines,” said head coach Andrew Leis. “We didn’t count a fall at this meet, but our next goal is to hit 24 for 24. So to have all six routines on all four events consistent, and then I think everything else will take care of itself from there.”

Against Penn, the Bulldogs team score solely consisted of zero fall routines, even though one of the only five out of six of the routines had zero-falls. In collegiate gymnastics, you are allowed to drop one score from your results, in order to maximize the team score point total. Thus, the one fall the team had with their leadoff gymnast on the balance beam, was not counted toward the 194.675 team score. 

Typically in collegiate gymnastics, it is common to see more than one fall on an event if one of the leadoff gymnasts falls on the event. For this reason, it is impressive that the next five routines on the event hit for the Bulldogs. Sporting their respective multi-colored hair ribbons for each class’ “My Cause” of choice, the gymnasts mustered support in their balance on the beam and for general awareness. 

“Our team did a really good job of keeping their composure and fighting through that rotation,” said Leis. “I thought that was a really big barrier for us to kind of cross this past meet. And, you know, obviously, the score we can improve a lot, but the fact that we stayed on after that fall, I thought was a good test for us.”

However, their scores did prove powerful against Penn. Their vault score (48.750) was only half a tenth from their vault program record, with Gigi Sabatini ’26 and Sherry Wang ’24 scoring a solid 9.8 and 9.775, respectively. 

The uneven bars, which, according to Leis, is the team’s favorite event to start on, were no challenge for the Elis, as they scored a solid 48.525 on the event as a team. Leis said that other teams get “nervous” when they start on bars, but that his team “looks forward to it.” But, no matter what event they get randomly chosen to start on, they will “not worry about the stuff [they] can’t control.”

As usual, the gymnasts dominated on the floor, scoring three 9.825s and a cumulative 49.025 points. The team continues to have “really strong individual performances,” but are still working on what they can accomplish as a unit, Leis said. 

The Bears also proved to be strong competitors, continuing their winning streak from last year’s Ivy Championship win.

According to Leis, “[Brown has] come out their first couple of weeks looking strong as well. So, our focus this week in practice is just to get where we’re trying to get every routine to improve by one half tenth. And then that will add up, you know, when you do the math over four events, that’s over a point on your team score.”

Although they weren’t able to do just that, their performance against Brown improved from last season. Sabatini competed on all four events, with her vault continuing to be a leader on the event for the Bulldogs. 

Wang, Sarah Wilson ’24 and Lily Aucoin ’27 also put up strong performances on the uneven bars right at the start of the meet. Ella Tashjian ’27, the team’s newest GEC Newcomer of the Week, leaped and landed on the floor perfectly, meaning a 9.825 and tying for second place on the event. 

Leis described her as “humble” and “business as usual,” but said that he also knows that Tashjian has the team in mind because “we’re big picture — we want to win as a group,” he said.

Looking forward, Leis and the team know that the four Ivy League teams are going to be strong and competitive forces this season, but they have faith in their abilities after putting up solid performances only three meets into the season. 

“I think this weekend proved to everybody and to us and to them that we’re going to give them a good challenge this year,” he said. “It’s going to be exciting.”

The team will be back home this weekend for their annual tri-meet at the Tonry Invitational. 

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The five sailors — Ian Barrows ’17, Stuart McNay ’05, Louisa Nordstrom ’20, Carmen Cowles ’25 and Stephan Baker ’26, all competed in the eight-day event in Miami, Florida. Although not Olympics qualifiers, current sailors Cowles and Baker put on strong performances in the mixed 470 class event and the 49er class event, respectively. Nordstrom placed fourth in the mixed 470 as well. Barrows and McNay will compete in Paris in a couple months with their respective non-Bulldog partners. 

Miami boasted sunny conditions for Barrows to add another accolade to his belt: qualifying for Team USA. After being in second place for the first two days of the event, he and his partner, Hans Henken, took the lead on day three and carried it all the way to the end of the race, securing their Olympics spots. 

During his time at Yale, Barrows was a leader and top competitor for the Bulldogs. Not only was he a four-time ICSA All-American Skipper, but he was also named NEISA Sailor of the Year twice, and ICSA Sailor of the Year in his senior year. Now, Barrows will continue to go for the gold in Paris.

Similarly, McNay is a two-time All-American, the 2002-03 NEISA Sportsman of the Year and a finalist for the 2004-05 College Sailor of the Year. However, he is also a seasoned Olympics competitor, with these qualifiers leading him to attend his fifth consecutive Olympics.

Down South, he and his partner — Eckerd College graduate and fellow seasoned Olympian Lara Dallman-Weiss — placed first in the mixed 470, never dropping down from first place over the entire eight-day period. 

McNay has competed with Team USA in both Beijing and Tokyo and even helped the team secure ninth overall in 2020 in the 470 men’s race. When not training for an Olympics, he has been an assistant sailing coach at his alma mater during the fall semester of 2005 and 2009, as well as during the Spring of 2006. 

Now, he is serving his third season as the Davis Emma Assistant Coach Chair for Brown University Sailing in 2022-24.

These seasoned competitors were not far ahead of Cowles in the mixed 470, as she placed only one point behind the two, just enough to barely miss qualifying. 

Once a NEISA Women’s Rookie of the Year, Cowles has since been Ivy League Women’s Champion, Quantum Women’s College Sailor of the Year Finalist and Women’s All American Skipper. Soon, she may be able to add an Olympic qualification to her accolades.  

Similarly, Baker, who finished fifth in the 49er event back in his hometown of Miami, was named NEISA Open Sailor of the Week, earned First Team All-NEISA and was honored with an All-American Honorable Mention all last season.

Nonetheless, McNay and Barrows will proudly represent the United States in Paris from July 26 to Aug. 11, hoping to take home the gold on the world’s biggest athletic stage.

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With a team total of 192.350, the gymnastic team fell just short of the University of New Hampshire and Long Island University, yet they placed first on the floor — possibly one of their strongest events this season. All but one first year out of the five competed this past Sunday and have stepped into a majority of the lineup. 

“This past weekend, I thought floor and vault were our standout events,” said head coach Andrew Leis. “I feel like we have a strong group on the floor this year here, so I feel like it’s going to be one of our better events consistently throughout the season.”

In fact, new collegiate competitor, Ella Tashjian ’27 scored a near-perfect 9.9 on the floor, perfectly executing and landing a double pike, double tuck and a front full front lay and winning the event. The newcomer also performed well on two other events — the vault and the balance beam — a “pretty exciting” feat for a first-time collegiate gymnast, said Leis.

Additionally, after only her second collegiate meet ever, Tashjian was named Gymnastics East Conference Newcomer of the Week yesterday afternoon. The last gymnast to win this accolade on the team was Gigi Sabatini ’26 last season during her first year on the team. 

The former Eli newcomer of the week came second in the all-around in Brooklyn and was Yale’s best vault performer for the second time in a row. 

According to Leis the team had a bit of a “hiccup” on the vault event last weekend at George Washington University, but there were big improvements this week, although they “still have some room to grow” he said. Specifically, just behind Sabatini was Sarah Wilson ’24 with a solid 9.750 on the event. 

The four-inch beam always poses uncertainty for any team, but seniors Wilson and Emma Mangiacapre ’24 performed with elegance, ease and balance, scoring first and second highest for the Bulldogs, respectively. 

The rest of the newcomers also made elegant and powerful strides on Sunday setting a positive tone for the rest of the season. Chloe DeJoy ’27 is now a part of the uneven bars and floor lineup, and is set to exhibit her balance beam routine for the first time this coming weekend. 

Additionally, first years Evangeline Chu ’27 and Lily Aucoin ’27 both debuted new routines on the beam and floor, respectively, this past weekend.

Yale is set to compete in their first home meet of the season in the John J. Lee Amphitheater this coming Sunday against GEC preseason poll first-place team, Penn. 

“It’ll be a great challenge for us,” said Leis. “We’re excited. Anytime we get to go head to head with them, it’s a big meet, so we’re looking forward to it.”

Yale will host the GEC Championships for the first time in the John J. Lee Amphitheater in March.

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The team, which boasts five new first-year athletes, ranked third in the Gymnastics East Conference preseason poll. These projections place Yale behind the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University, although they won second place in the GEC last season. Throughout the season the Bulldogs will fight to score well both as a team and in the individual events at the Ivy Classic, the GEC Championship and the NCAA Regionals and Nationals. 

At the Charles E. Smith Center in Washington, D.C. last Sunday, the Bulldogs took to the competition floor for the first time in their 2023-24 season, competing against Penn, George Washington University, Cornell University and Temple University. 

In addition to the entire team’s first meet of the season, the event was three first-years’ — Lily Aucoin ’27, Chloe DeJoy ’27, and Ella Tashjian ’27 — debut on the collegiate competition floor. Aucoin and DeJoy both competed on the uneven bars, while Tashjian took the lead amongst the Bulldogs on floor, with a whopping 9.8250. 

Tashjian is also on the list for CollegeGymNews’ “most anticipated on vault,” with her clean yurchenko 1.5 twist stuck landing. 

Yale gymnastics veterans Gigi Sabatini ’26 and Emma Mangiacapre ’24 both scored the highest for the team on vault and beam, respectively. The two tied on the balance beam with a 9.8520. Additionally, Sabatini took home an all-around gold for the team with a high score of 38.8250.

Sabatini was one of eleven gymnasts on the team that received the Women’s Collegiate Gymnastics Association Scholastic All-American Honors for the 2022-23 season. The award is only given to student-athletes with a GPA of 3.5 or higher for the academic year, of which Yale had many.

Ahead of their first home meet of the season in two weeks, the gymnasts will make their way to Brooklyn, New York, this weekend for a quad-meet versus Long Island University, New Hampshire and Southern Connecticut. Last January, the Bulldogs fell to LIU by just over four points.

The inaugural GEC competitive season was in 2022. 

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Organizers had planned to throw the student-run music festival, which is slated to begin at 4 p.m. on Saturday, on Old Campus. Although it will now be held indoors, the lineup — including R&B artist Ravyn Lenae, French DJ Dombresky and rapper Pusha T, as well as student acts PJ Frantz, Tired of Tuesday and DJ Leon Thotsky — will remain unchanged.

On Friday morning, Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd wrote in an email to students that the distribution of Spring Fling wristbands and the sale of merchandise would be put on hold until further notice. Three hours later, the Spring Fling Committee wrote to students that inclement weather conditions had forced the festival to relocate from Old Campus. High winds, heavy rain and temperatures around 50 F are currently forecasted for Saturday. 

“Given these conditions, we cannot proceed with Spring Fling as planned,” members of the Spring Fling Committee wrote in the email to students. “This isn’t a judgment call made by the Spring Fling Committee: these are non-negotiable regulations set by the stage production company and Yale Emergency Services.”

Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd told the News that Yale’s Spring Fling operations team had been closely monitoring the weather forecast all week, and concluded when predictions worsened on Thursday that the winds were too high to safely hold the event on an outdoor stage. The Spring Fling stage was dismantled and removed from Old Campus on Friday morning.

In their email to students, members of the Spring Fling Committee wrote that they learned of the decision Thursday afternoon and had been “scrambling to find a solution” since then. 

“It seemed we would have to cancel the event altogether, but the students on the Spring Fling Committee have done an amazing job of creating a fallback plan,” Boyd told the News. “I’m grateful to College Street Music Hall for their willingness to accommodate us at the last minute, and to many Yale colleagues for their speed and flexibility.” 

The wristband distribution process, which began on Wednesday, has been canceled, with the committee voiding all wristbands which have been distributed. Tickets for the event, which remain free for all students, will now be distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis using Eventbrite. Ticketing will begin at 5:00 p.m. on Friday for graduating and first-semester seniors, and will open to the rest of the student body at 5:30 p.m. 

College Street Music Hall, however, has a capacity of 2,000 patrons, meaning that the majority of Yale’s 6,500 undergraduate students and 14,500 total student body will not be able to attend. According to the email from the Spring Fling Committee, College Street Music Hall will admit students on a rotating capacity system, admitting more students as people leave. 

Though the festival remains free, admission is first-come, first-serve. Wristbands that were handed out earlier in the week are no longer valid. The festival is using Eventbrite to distribute electronic tickets beforehand. However, on the day of, a rotating capacity system will allow for more attendees to be admitted as others leave. If a student with a ticket exits the concert early, they will not be allowed back in.

Although students were previously allowed to each bring one guest to the festival, it is now only open to enrolled Yalies.

“I was planning on having a friend come that goes to school in Canada,” Joaquín Fernandez-Duque ’25 told the News. “She changed her train to come here for Spring Fling and to get here in time to pick up her guest wristband. She’s now in Connecticut having spent the money to get here, but with no show to attend.” 

Alvin Delgado ’23 said he was glad to have guaranteed tickets as a senior, but noted that many of his friends were considering not attending due to the lack of re-entry, which limits the flexibility that the event usually provides. 

Delgado also said that College Street Music Hall  is not an ideal place for Spring Fling for the “crowd and energy” typical of Spring Fling. Having the festival indoors at all, Delgado said, would make it difficult to recreate the same chaos that Spring Fling usually brings. 

“I would’ve still been fine going if it was outdoors and raining and would’ve had the luxury of leaving, drying off, getting warm and coming back,” Delgado said. 

Cade Napier ’23 acknowledged the Spring Fling committee is doing their best, and said it is hard to do the right thing given the circumstances. 

Napier told the News he doesn’t want to stand outside in the rain waiting, given that the tickets do not guarantee entry, so he is undecided on whether or not he will attend. Friends of his, he said, joked about setting up a tent outside the venue. 

“Why bother giving tickets if getting a ticket doesn’t mean you get to go?” Napier told the News. 

In their email to students, the Spring Fling Committee acknowledged the inconvenience that the last-minute switch posed to the student body. 

“We know that this information is coming too late,” they wrote. “It’s coming too late for us as well.”

Neither the Spring Fling Committee, nor Yale’s Director of Emergency Management George Hines responded to immediate requests for comment. 

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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The weekend allowed sailors to get back in the fleet racing mindset, as they placed third at the Admirals Cup and tenth at the Boston Dinghy Club Challenge Cup. Kings Point saw a light breeze on Saturday, but anticlimactic winds the next day led to only one race taking place. Nearby in Rhode Island, the women’s team came by in fourth place, despite a precarious eastward wind.

“This past weekend was a challenging weekend with tricky conditions, but I was able to learn a lot and continue to get better moving forward,” Nathan Sih ’25 said. “As we near the end of the season, I will continue to keep practicing hard and trying to improve all the way up until nationals at the end of May and beginning of June.”

In Kings Point, the Bulldogs started off by staying in the top five, but ultimately fell out of first place towards the end of the day. 

Although overall Yale placed tenth in Boston, Jessi Avila-Shah ’25 and teammate Mateo Farina ’25 placed second in their division, taking advantage of the lighter and shiftier winds that Sunday brought to the Charles. 

“This weekend was a pretty classic weekend on the Charles River with a shifty breeze,” Avila-Shah said. “I thought our team was good in terms of maintaining good boat speed and fleet race starts.”

The No. 2 ranked women’s team competed with higher stakes this past weekend at the NEISA Fleet Race Champs, a week after their win at the NEISA team race championship. 

The team came out in fourth out of the top 16 teams, so they did not receive automatic qualifying berths for the ICSA Women’s National Championship. Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University received this honor as they placed first and second in the races. 

Battling the shifty conditions for the Reed Trophy were skippers Mia Nicolosi ’25, Emma Cowles ’25 and Megan Grimes ’24, with crews Helena Ware ’23, Sarah Moeder ’26 and Carmen Berg ’26.

Regardless of the weekend’s results, all the Eli sailors are looking forward to their postseason practice from May into June.

“I’m looking forward to postseason practicing and really refining our skills before nationals,” Jack Egan ’25 said. “Everyone can always improve their boat handling, so that’s what we will be working on.” 

According to Sih, once the academic year ends, the team will be practicing twice a day without worrying about schoolwork. 

This weekend will see the Bulldogs compete for an automatic berth to the coed fleet race nationals at the New England Dinghy Champ. The breezes will be shifty, but the team will look to be shiftier.

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The Bulldogs began the stretch with a strong first-place finish at the New England Team Race Championship on April 8 and 9, going 4–1 in their races.

“Winning the New England Team Race Championship was great as it auto-qualified us for the ICSA Team Race National Championships in Kings Point at the end of May,” Nathan Sih ’25 told the News.

The auto-qualification is an important one for the co-ed team, as the Inter-collegiate Sailing Association National Championships are the biggest of the season. 

The Bulldogs also took some satisfaction in defeating Ivy League rivals Harvard University and Dartmouth College behind strong performances in light wind conditions from skippers Teddy Nicolosi ’24, Jack Egan ’25 and Stephan Baker ’26.

“Conditions were very light and tricky which made it difficult to race and led to the regatta being shortened,” Baker said. “Despite having less races, we were still able to close out the victory with a race to spare. While this victory helped us clinch a spot in the National Championship in King’s Point Academy, NY and the one seed, we are going to continue working extremely hard to defend the national championship title this May.”

The focus then swung to the women’s team as they competed the next weekend in the New England Women’s Team Race Championship. 

The women turned in an equally impressive performance, as they went 15–2 with their only losses coming from Dartmouth. The strong performances earned the Bulldogs another first-place finish and auto-qualification for Nationals.

“The team will now be shifting more towards fleet racing, although team racing will still feature prominently, especially for our women’s team, as they have Women’s Team Race Nationals in two weeks,” Egan said. 

The Bulldogs finished out their in-season team races with the Oberg Trophy, a three-division race in a festive Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the weekend before Marathon Monday.

The Bulldogs turned out strong performances yet again, but came up just four points short of another first-place finish. The team was led by Mateo Farina ’25 and Jessi Avila-Shah ’25, who won the B Division. 

All ICSA National Championships will be held in Kings Point, New York, in late May.

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The event celebrated the centennial of women in carillon generally — the Yale Guild itself only began accepting women in 1970, one year after the College went coeducational. The concert was part of the guild’s alumni reunion, which also celebrated its 101st year of bellringing at Yale this past weekend.

“Although trained as a historian, I was astounded at how profoundly misleading our understanding of carillon history has been,” said Yale Guild alumna Tiffany Ng ’05. “Contemporary women have believed ourselves recent entrants to the profession, and thus entrants with relatively few role models. I’m thrilled that we can use the 2023 centennial year to promote this ‘newly discovered’ history, which of course has always been there for the telling.”

The carillon instrument itself turned 500 years old in 2015, but women have only been involved in bellringing for about the last century. Even so, at the 2019 Guild of Carillonneurs in North America Congress, only 11.3 percent of the pieces performed were by women. On the international scale, only 21.9 percent of pieces were performed by women at the 2017 World Carillon Federation Congress.

“Carillon history is told as a history of men,” said Ng. 

Ng gathered an international team of historians and students to embark on a project to research the first women involved in carillon history. They initially believed that fewer than a dozen women were known to be active with the carillon from the 15th century to 1950 — however, her project has since identified over 100 women.

Her team includes Audrey Dye from the Académie de Musique Wavre in Belgium, Scott Or from the University College London, University of Michigan student researcher Sarah Penrose, incoming Yale graduate student Cedric McCoy, University of Michigan student Emmet Lewis and writers who hail from all over the globe.

Ng previously called Timothy Dwight College her home as an undergraduate student studying  English and music. She now lives in Ann Arbor, where she is the associate professor of carillon and chair of the organ department at the University of Michigan. 

When Ng received her admissions decision from Yale, she knew she wanted to be involved with the famed Harkness Tower bells, joining the Guild of Carillonneurs as a first year. During her time in the Guild, she helped renovate the tower, curate a bells exhibit at the Yale University Collection of Musical Instruments and prepare for the 2006 national carillon convention at Yale.

“By the time I graduated, I was so deeply invested in the carillon that despite the rarity of job opportunities, I knew I would try to keep playing the carillon for the rest of my life,” she said. “Now I hold one of fewer than a dozen full-time carillon jobs in North America and get to live that dream.” 

Ng’s team member Penrose said she has actually never played the carillon. Despite her inexperience, she was captured by the instrument and its rich history. She said she is especially enthusiastic about celebrating the feminist perspective of carillon history.

Back at Yale, Guild co-chairs Kimie Han ’23 and Julia Zheng ’23 have been focused on organizing the “100 Years of Women in Carillon” concert.” 

“Music is a vessel for us to interpret and carry the emotions and reflections of a composer into the present,” Zheng said. “To be able to amplify music composed by the thriving community of women carillonists through Harkness Tower, the ultimate megaphone, is a powerful feeling.”

Zheng said she came to love the Guild and the carillon through the five-week initiation process, when she learned the workings of managing 43 tons of bronze bells whose sound can be heard from almost a mile away.

She commented on the duality of carillon performance as an art that is both public and hidden. Carillonneurs play sequestered in Harkness, she said, but members of the Yale community hear them from all over campus.

“It’s our responsibility as performers to see our music as something deeply intertwined with the fabric of students’ lives as they walk, pass by, linger for a moment: art with direct impact, not art created in a playing cabin vacuum,” she said. “Once we accept this responsibility, the importance of curating repertoire from diverse voices becomes clear.”

The Yale University Guild of Carillonneurs officially formed in 1949.

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“Ever since my freshman year, the atmosphere of the fencing team has always been so inclusive,” Tan said. “We have fencers who come from all different backgrounds, and we strive to converse about our differences. As a very small and tight-knit team, we do a great job at making sure everyone is comfortable around teammates whether it’s during practice, at tournaments, or even outside of athletics.”

Tan, a Texas native, first discovered the sport when she saw a fencing flyer at her local library. 

As a high school fencer, she was a 2019 USA Cadet World Team Alternate, member of USA Designated Cadet and Junior International Foil Team, silver medalist in the Junior event at the 2021 May North American Cup and silver medalist in the junior event at 2020 Junior Olympics, among many other accolades. 

“I fell in love with the sport and decided that I wanted to fence in college to further my fencing career.” Tan said. “There were a lot of fencers who were older than me who told me how being on a fencing team in college was one of the best decisions they made, so I was very enthusiastic about fencing in college from the start.”

Because her parents immigrated from China to America before she was born, Tan wanted to be the person that pushed herself in school and in fencing, she said. Tan emphasized that her parents never pushed her to do this, but she just felt that she wanted to on her own. 

“Seeing how my parents worked so hard for our family, it definitely motivated me to work just as hard as them,” she said.

At Yale, Tan has continued earning honors as she recently qualified for the NCAA championships this year, helping the Bulldogs finish in 10th place overall. Additionally, she was selected for the United States Fencing Coaches Association All-Northeast Region team, alongside five other teammates. 

That group includes Zhou, another foilist who has attributed some degree of her success to her Chinese roots back home. Zhou’s career began in a Chinese after-school fencing program in Boston when she was nine, and she has continued with the sport for the last 12 years. 

Zhou’s coach in Boston is also Chinese and was able to provide her with the opportunity to train with the national teams in China — both in Shanghai and Jiangsu — during her high school summers. 

“Although these training camps were tough and had long hours, I learned how to be disciplined and hardworking,” Zhou said. “I think that’s one of the most important parts of being a student athlete.”

This training allowed her to earn Team Gold in the 2018 Junior World Cup, eighth place individually in the 2018 Junior World Cup, eighth in the 2017 International Cadet Designated Circuit and a Team Gold in the 2016 Cadet World Cup. 

Zhou qualified to the NCAA Championships this year, placing twelfth overall in the foil event and also being named to the United States Fencing Coaches Association All-Northeast Region team. 

Zhou’s success does not stop on the piste, as she might be more well-known for her presence on TikTok. Zhou has amassed 736.7K followers and 46.0M likes on her TikTok account @emmezhou. The page mostly features “What I Eat in a Day at Yale” videos, where she reviews dining halls and shows the world what meals are like at an Ivy League university. 

Just recently, she began sharing the fencing side of her life to her large audience.

“I love making videos about fencing because so many people do not know what it is, and have many misconceptions about it,” she said. “I think fencing is something that most of my followers did not know I do at Yale, so I enjoy sharing this new part of my life with them.”

Comments such as, “more fencing videos please!” and “I want to go to Yale through fencing too,” show just how much influence her videos have over her mostly younger audience. 

Zhou’s TikToks provide a window into the team for many. One key dynamic that both Zhou and Tan highlighted was the overall welcoming vibe and inclusivity of the fencing team, making it very easy for them to embrace their Pan-Asian identities on the team. 

“Fencing is a very inclusive sport, so as a pan-Asian fencer, I’ve felt very at home” said Tan.  “Over the past few years, there have been a lot of Pan-Asian Americans involved with fencing, so over the next few years, I believe that fencing will be a sport that will be very big within the Asian community.”

Although Zhou is graduating, Tan hopes to help the fencing team finish among the top three at Ivies next year – a goal that was unattainable this year due to a variety of injuries. 

Emme Zhou ’23 was named an All-American in women’s foil in March 2022.

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