This Junior Olympics was a not a good tournament for me as it was my last shot at world team. Sadly, I blew it and I will not be a 2017 World Team member but I do hope to be on team again next year. The road to world team is a long one and when you mix that with collegiate fencing, school and sleep it seems impossible to balance everything.

I am going to post this background information again to try to explain what I am talking about.

I travel around the country and around the world in an effort to try and make National Team and recently retaining my World Team status. National team is the top twelve girls on the points list and are selected to represent the United States of America in International tournaments. Of these twelve girls the top four are taken for World Team. The World Team competes in that years World Championships. I have been lucky enough to have made it the past two years and I’m fighting for this year’s team. Another part of fencing is the collegiate meets. When we travel we either get the cheapest flight or we bus for hours to get where we are going. This means that about seventy of us are all crammed onto a bus for eight hours or more to go to competition, Unless it’s a travel team only competition in which case the number drops to around fifteen people. No matter the size, when we travel while representing Penn State we aren’t seeing luxury hotels or eating at fancy restaurants. We are more likely than not eating at the host college’s dining hall and staying in Hampton Inns or something.

For this blog I will talk about my super annoying trip to the great Kansas City for a pretty awful tournament.