Ward Melville rallies to win Long Island fencing championship

Chris Ancona knows that in fencing, there is almost always a solution. He found one when he was down 4-1 in a first round bout against Zach Ortiz, before turning it around for a 5-4 win. And he found another when he came back from a 3-2 deficit on match point with a Long Island championship on the line.

Ancona beat Andrew Burns in the clinching bout at foil to give Ward Melville a 14-9 win over host Garden City on Tuesday and lead the Patriots to their 15th Long Island championship in 18 years.

“I kept doing the same thing [against Ortiz] and needed to figure out a solution,” said Ancona, who finished 3-0. “He’s the better fencer, but we have fenced so many times [since seventh grade] so I had a good idea of what he was going to do.”

Clinging to a 2-1 lead against a rowdy Garden City team in its own gym, a tie would have certainly caused a momentum shift. But Ancona adjusted his parry and scored the next four points for a 5-4 win and a 3-1 first round lead. It was an early, yet pivotal match for Ward Melville.

“We knew he was their top foil fencer coming in and we prepped for him, and him and Zach usually go back and forth with each other,” Garden City coach Kevin Oliver said. “But today he was just on, and that’s just going to be the case some days.”

Sebastian Vazquez won the next bout for Garden City, but Ward Melville took four of the next five bouts for a 7-3 lead before Logan O’Grady got Garden City back on the board. WM’s Leo Takemaru took the next bout in sabre and Ancona won another epic bout, 5-4, against Vazquez to give WM a 9-4 lead.

“He sees the action before it happens and believes in himself more than anything,” WM coach Jenna Ellis said. “He’s probably one of the smartest fencers I’ve ever encountered.”

In the final bout, Ancona changed weapons after he was down 3-2. His foil wasn’t broken, he just needed to regroup.

“It was a very stressful situation,” Ancona said. “It gave me a chance to settle down and realize what I had to do to win.”