What types of sports do little girls like? Swimming? Soccer? Softball? Fencing? . . . fencing?

When Sherry Posthumus went to the fencing gym while pregnant with Lisa, she had no idea her daughter would follow in her footsteps as a foil fencer.

"I want to sword fight, Mom," Lisa Posthumus recalled telling her mother.

Now Posthumus is a top-ranked foil fencer with collegiate, national and international honors. However, she wants to expand her horizons as a fencer and has begun fencing epee, a traditional male weapon. She and her mother also want to see the women's role in fencing expand into coaching and managing.

This development has already begun to make headway.

Women epee fencers are popping up all over the world, fencing in national and international tournaments. There are even a few women sabre fencers out there. The sports are expected to eventually grow into major divisions of collegiate, national and international fencing teams.

"Women's epee is nationally gaining power," Coach Emmanuil Kaidanov said. "Maybe in the near future -- the next five or 10 years -- women might be fencing epee on the collegiate level."

For now, Lisa Posthumus fences epee as an aside to her career as a foil fencer. She started competing in epee a year and a half ago.

"It's a relatively new weapon (for women) and it's becoming really popular," she said.

Posthumus' mother encouraged her to begin fencing epee by explaining that everyone had to start on the same level and she wouldn't be any less experienced than everyone else.

Posthumus' build -- tall with a long reach -- is also conducive to an epee fencer. In epee, the whole body is a target so the further away the opponent, the harder it is to score.

"I fence epee like a foil fencer," she said. "(But) I win more in epee than in foil."

Well, she wins a lot in foil. She has been competitively fencing foil for the past seven years and has been to Junior Olympic festivals. She has also fenced on numerous world teams.

In epee, she will fight for a position in the top three to earn a spot on the world team which will compete in Austria.

Posthumus' venture into the new world of epee stretches beyond her own success in the weapon. She wants to see women progress in fencing, hopefully even in sabre, an even more predominantly male weapon.

Her mother, the women's fencing coach at Stanford, is also trying to promote the advancement of women in the sport.

"We have got a bunch of people looking at why it is that the number of women is diminishing in the sport of fencing, in coaching and in managing," Sherry Posthumus said. "It's not just the epee, though, it's in all sports."

She explained that some rules in women's fencing have already been changed to match the ones in men's. The number of touches in a bout, for example, was always less than that of men's fencing.

"Now women fence five-touch bouts," she said. "I guess they thought women weren't strong enough to fence five touches."

In the new women's epee division, women under 15 are not allowed to fence. Sherry Posthumus doesn't see any sense in this rule, especially since most girls at that age are actually bigger and stronger than most boys. That's another rule she hopes will disappear.

As the first woman to manage a Pan American team and then the 1988 Olympic squad, she hopes that women can share in her experiences in the future.

Female coaches, however, may take longer to emerge. As of now, California State at Long Beach and Ohio State are the two strongest teams with female coaches for both the men's and women's teams. Many teams do have women coaches, but they deal only with women's foil.

Penn State has had women coaches in the past, but they coached only the women's foil team. Coach Beth Alphin coached the women's foil team from 1966 until 1983.

"It's hard for them to coach three weapons if they weren't taught three weapons," Posthumus said.

Posthumus hopes to continue her career in fencing, hopefully in the coaching field. She is a sophomore majoring in exercise physiology and plans to become a sports therapist. Coaching or managing would be a hobby.