Fencing National Champion Awarded for Work in Classroom

Profile of Emily Cross

by Britt Caputo      

        We huddle onto bleachers in a massive Beijing stadium, nervous like the bustling crowds around us, and it is 2008. Emily R. Cross ’08 walks confidently up to the strip, where she will fence for Team USA in the Olympics games. Her first coach watches proudly, recalling when she was accepted into college and he told her, “in 2008 I will go home and you will be there!” Her parents perch nearby, perhaps remembering the Saturday afternoons they spent at the Metropolis Fencing Club or the Fencer’s Club in New York City, when Emily was nine, so that her father could teach her his college hobby. And her brother, Sam Cross ’07, is no doubt thinking of the year before, when the two of them were Co-Captains of the Harvard Varsity Fencing Team.

       For now, in 2006, it is this team that wins Emily’s immediate attention. Her Olympic ambitions are still slightly tentative, even though she anticipates training for the qualification try-outs, which begin in April 2007. Despite her numerous and impressive accolades, including the Junior (Under 20) World Champion title she has held for the past two years, the 2005 Crimson Female Rookie of the Year, 2006 Crimson Female Athlete of the Year, and two-time All-American status, she considers her most memorable fencing moment one she shared with her team at the 2006 NCAA tournament in Houston, Texas. (Not, notably, her personal win at the NCAAs in 2005, when she came first in foil). “It had never been done before in Harvard history,” she explained enthusiastically of their victory. “We had no idea [who won],” because the Women’s Team boarded a Boston-bound plane before the men had finished, leaving their female counterparts in nail-biting suspense. When text messages, inaccessible during flight, finally reached their cell phones and bore the news of their combined success, “we all started screaming and crying on the plane,” Emily said. They were record-setters.

       Before Harvard, Emily excelled at fencing as an individual’s sport. At Harvard, she discovered that team life reinvigorates her. “I was nervous about fencing for a team,” she said. “Because part of why I liked it was fencing on my own.” But she also recalls, “when I first got here, I was kind of burnt out,” not least because frequent traveling to international competitions obliged her to miss significant events—and simply time with friends—during her junior and senior years in high school, at The Brearley School in New York City. Playing for a team infused the sport with an entirely new dynamic.

       “It’s a completely different game. In the end, it’s a lot of fun: you get to road trip with your friends and stay in a cheesy motel. When you’re with other people,” who have the same goals and passions, the grunt-work of commute becomes “less of a chore and more of a party,” she said. Companionship and camaraderie make trips more pleasant, and competition more fierce. “People—myself included—are much more intense when they’re playing for a team,” she said compassionately. “You don’t want to let your team down.”

        She cites her brother’s drive as compelling evidence for the motivating power of playing with a shared jersey. “When he fences for Harvard, he fences so much better than he did [individually],” she speculated. “I’ve never come in contact with someone who cares so little about his own wins.” While Sam Cross wrote in an e-mail, “one thing that distinguishes our team from others is that we really enjoy practicing and spending time together,” Emily also credits their unified success to Peter Brand, Harvard’s Head Fencing Coach since 1999. “He works hard to put together a team that gets along,” she said.

        The transition from individual to team player has another advantage for Emily: her collegiate fencing schedule is far more easy-going, like she is. “The new way of training that I’ve fallen into is a lot more relaxed. It suits my temperament more,” she said. “There was a time where I was sort of feeling so-so,” she said of intense competitive fencing. “But I’m definitely back feeling great about it, and a lot of it had to do with fencing with the team.”

       Emily entered her first tournament at age 11 and traveled to Nîmes, France to play for Team USA in the Senior Championships at age 14. Since her first bouts on the strip, when fencing was simply “a father-daughter thing,” her training schedule increased progressively, eventually amounting to six times per week at four to five hours a session. On Saturdays she would practice from noon to five. On those Saturdays, that is, which weren’t spent traveling or competing at international tournaments, and that number is too great to count. “Senior year [of high school] I have no idea how many competitions I attended,” she said. “A lot.”

        In college, her training schedule reduced significantly. She only practices, with the team, five times a week from three-thirty to six. And her private traveling itinerary has also recently lessened, when she turned 20, and no longer qualifies for the Junior competitions. “But it seems to work out well,” she comments, modestly. “I’ve been going to a lot of competitions actually on my own,” meaning several Senior World Championships, which are less frequent than the Junior tournaments. “I didn’t expect [to win],” she said with the easy-going optimism she alluded to earlier. “Because I’ve never trained so little.” Her confident calm even allows her to discuss the stress fracture in her foot, which prevented her from fencing at all this summer, without a hint of anxiety.

        So she practices less, and seems to keep on winning. What gives? “I think I have [gotten better since coming to Harvard] and I don’t really understand it because I train a lot less than I ever did at home,” she said. But, “I feel a lot more motivated,” she said of her experience at Harvard. “Everyone there is ready to work and motivated by working together.” And besides, Emily is well practiced in dividing her time between rigorous demands and rebalancing her schedule to accommodate change. One of the greatest challenges student-athletes face is the significant amount of time spent on the road. “It’s tough to be gone a lot of weekends, and to be always packing and unpacking,” she said. “A lot of [handing student-athlete status] is knowing how to manage your time,” a skill she has mastered from years of traveling and fencing during her freshman year, in high school, and earlier. Pick classes wisely, go to professors early: “they don’t mind,” she has found, “when you miss something if you tell them in advance.” Still, her schedule often obliges her to take-on challenging scrambles, such as finishing a Chemistry Lab in the rush of Reading Period, and she finishes them with flying marks. In 2005 and 2006, Emily received All-Ivy Academic Honors, an award given to non-freshman athletes who start or are otherwise critical to their team, and have a minimum of a 3.0 grade point average. She is an Honors Biology concentrator, who plans to write a thesis based on the lab research she did at Harvard this summer.

        She is also considering applying to medical school after graduation, or, if she attends, after her trip to Beijing in 2008. The Senior World Championships have served as trial runs for Emily to determine her readiness for an Olympic challenge, and her success has been, in her eyes, surprising.

        “I’m sort of at a turning point right now with fencing. I decided I wanted to go to a couple Senior World Cups after school ended to see how things go,” she said. “They went really really well, surprisingly.” The Junior Championships are less of a big deal, she explained, because the under-20 competitors are students, like she is. On the other, intimidating hand, “seniors are professional fencers. Europeans train ten hours a day and use state-of-the art facilities,” she said. “It’s hard to keep up with them.”

        But she did, and remarks only, in a typically modest fashion, “I can’t really understand how I do well against these people who train all the time.” Emily trains hard, even if she trains in smaller doses than her fiercest competitors, but perhaps a critical element to her success is an inner talent, an indescribable, and unique understanding of her flawless game. Sam pointed to this aspect, when he called Emily “a very smart fencer,” in a sport, he said. Such athletic intelligence as hers “is rare even at an international level,” he said. “She understands the game in a way that lets her shine among her international competitors, most of whom have trained in fencing as a full time job since childhood.”