The fencing teams walked away with a national team championship, four All-America fencers, an Outstanding Male Fencer of the Year and a Coach of the Year at this year's NCAA Championships.

The Lions beat Columbia, 36-35, to win the overall team championship. The epee squad's first-place finish earned the team 12 points and vaulted the Lions over Columbia. Host Notre Dame took third place and Penn finished fourth.

Geoff Russell, Jim Marsh, Dave Cox and Ed Mufel earned All-America status with their individual results. Russell and Marsh finished fourth and fifth in epee, respectively, Cox placed fourth in sabre, and Mufel took second in foil. Marsh was also voted the Outstanding Male Fencer of the Year.

Marsh, the team captain, described the scene to a group which met the men's foil and epee squads at University Park Airport last night:

"Geoff (Russell) was fencing (Columbia's) Ben Atkins and we were pumped up," he said. "We were like, 'Geoff, every touch, every touch.' He started, one nothing. Geoff was fencing great, he was fencing absolutely awesome. Two nothing, three nothing.

"I couldn't watch, I had to sit down . . . I said, 'Screw this, I'm going to watch.' Four nothing. One more! One more! Boom, boom, boom, BOOM! I choked, everybody was hugging and screaming."

The epee team entered the competition seeded lowest of any of the Penn State squads, but it came from behind for a surprise win over Columbia.

"The funniest thing was, epee was the lowest seeded team before the tournament," assistant coach Wes Glon said. "Sabre was seeded No. 2, women's foil No. 4, men's foil No. 2 and epee was seeded No. 5. And they did the best. They didn't have a choice. They were supposed to lose, but if you want to win, you have to win. The focus and the concentration was the determination and the difference."

"Even when it was 4-0, I was thinking that I couldn't let up and I wasn't thinking that all I needed was one more touch," Russell said. "I still could have really folded and lost the bout, but I didn't and I got the last touch. It was really great."

"In team results, we didn't perform as well as we had expected to or wanted to," Cox said of the sabre squad. "But what we did was enough to contribute to the championship."

"It's done, we won. We dreamed about it for years and finally we got it," Coach Emmanuil Kaidanov said. "Now we have to think about next year."

Kaidanov's fellow coaches voted him Coach of the Year, based on the skill and talent of his team and his strip manners, Lisa Posthumus said. Since Kaidanov has coached Penn State, the Lions have taken 10th, eighth, fifth, sixth, third and first place in he NCAA championships.

"He's by far, in my opinion, the best coach in the country," Posthumus said. "If you want to do anything with your fencing career and you wanted to make the best choice for a coach to take you as far as you could go, he's the perfect coach."