In fencing, a loud beep signals when someone’s been hit. At Heartland Fencing Academy on a Wednesday night, the open practice space is filled with a cacophony of those beeps and the clash of swords.
A dozen fencers decked out in protective gear are engaged in mock bouts, each person executing a series of incredibly deliberate, thought-out movements made in the blink of an eye. Academy head coach Emilia Ivanova says fencing is like a physical game of speed chess.
“I make my move according to your move and you make your move according to my move,” she says. “Different fencers, different reactions, different momentums. Everything comes very fast.”
Ivanova teaches about 150 students of all ages and the roster is still growing, mirroring nationwide trends. USA Fencing reports adding more than 10,000 youth members nationwide since 2016. That’s a 68% increase.
Primarily, Ivanova teaches epee and foil — two of three weapons used in fencing. The other is sabre. The rules vary by weapon but competitors score by touching an opponent in a designated area.
Foil is scored by hitting your opponent with the tip of the blade only in the torso area. This variation prioritizes strong footwork. A point in epee is also scored with the tip, but the target is the whole body, including the head; the blade is a bit heavier and generally bouts are more about strategy and timing. Sabre is called a cutting weapon, as points are scored with the side of the blade anywhere above the waist.
Ivanova’s track record in foil is stellar: a seven-time national champion for Bulgaria and a silver medalist in the European Championships. As a coach, she led the Bulgarian National Women’s team, where students reached the World Championships and the 1996 Olympic Games.
In Kansas City, she has taught fencers who train for fun, others who went on to major colleges — like Princeton, Stanford and Yale — and some who became Junior Olympic and NCAA champions.
One long-tenured student is Stefan Panagiev, who also helps coach. Like Ivanova, he started his fencing journey in their home country of Bulgaria.
Panagiev says fencing gave him life skills that helped him graduate recently from the University of Kansas with a degree in microbiology.
“It’s consistency and persistence,” he says. “It’s showing up every day, going to tournaments. Like no one's success story is here and upwards. There are ups and downs and you just have to keep at it.”
Panagiev took a break from fencing to complete his studies, but he's training for World Cups now and hopes to one day make the Olympic team.
Today, the city’s two major academies — Heartland and Kansas City Fencing Center — are among the best in the Midwest.
But in the 1970s, fencing was a loose assortment of coaches and kids at various universities and community colleges. That changed with Kansas City’s controversial plan to desegregate its public schools starting in the mid-1980s.
An expensive desegregation plan
Central High School, at Linwood Boulevard and Indiana Avenue, is one of the oldest schools west of the Mississippi and the first public school in Kansas City. It opened in 1867 as a prestigious all-white school, remaining the city’s only public school until 1890.
In 1950, the neighborhoods surrounding the school were 99.8% white, but by 1960 the same neighborhoods were 17.9% white. As white people moved out to the suburbs, student demographics at Central followed suit. By the 1970s, schools east of Troost, like Central, were 90% Black.
The school’s academic reputation began to unravel in the ‘70s and ‘80s as the Black middle class began to leave the inner city for the inner suburbs, says Brad Poos, associate director for the Institute for Urban Education at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, who is writing a book on Central set to come out in the fall. He says students began to leave and academic standards dropped.
Soon, Central was labeled as an underachieving, violent, Black school.
“This was not by chance, this was by design,” Poos says. “What we have are communities now where all of the resources have been siphoned off, educational communities included, and those opportunities have become far fewer over the years.”
Throughout the '80s and the following decades, Kansas City was embroiled in legal battles and lawsuits. One in particular was a 1977 suit by the Kansas City, Missouri, School District on behalf of students against Kansas, Missouri and suburban districts in the metro area. They alleged it was the responsibility of the state and suburban districts to desegregate public schools in Kansas City, Missouri.
In 1986, Federal Judge Russell Clark ordered an education plan to rebuild the district using taxpayer dollars. This led to an expensive desegregation effort throughout the rest of the decade and into the ‘90s.
Based on promising efforts in Los Angeles, San Diego and Milwaukee, education leaders in Kansas City hoped specialized and unique programs would draw suburban kids back to inner-city schools. They proceeded to create as many “magnet” schools as possible.
The $2 billion project was funded by the state of Missouri, local taxpayers and the school district. Nearly $33 million went to a new facility for the renamed flagship school: Central Computers Unlimited/Classical Greek Magnet High School.
The facilities were among the best in the nation, with innovative curricula in computer technology and Olympic sports — like fencing. But it was the hiring of Vladimir Nazlymov in 1991 that truly jumpstarted the school’s reimagining and sparked a boom in Kansas City fencing.
“He was the one actually who recommended me to come here and to start a foil program,” Ivanova says. “He was the one who recommended me to come to Kansas City.”
Building a fencing program
Nazlymov’s decision to accept the position at Central shocked the fencing the world.
The coach of the world-champion Soviet sabre team, Nazlymov was a two-time sabre world champion and silver medalist at the 1976 Olympic games. In taking the job in Kansas City, perhaps the most decorated sabre fencer in the world turned down offers from several national teams.
Dan Fleming joined the UMKC fencing club in the ‘70s and continued his involvement into the ‘80s and beyond as leader of the Kansas City Fencing Association. He was also on Central’s athletic advisory committee and had met Nazlymov at a competition. When it came time to hire a coach, Fleming says, the interview process was a who’s who of American coaches.
“But when we found out that Vladimir is willing to come in and interview, we thought, 'Well, this guy is perhaps the most decorated modern fencer in the world.' And I go, ‘Well, I don’t think we got anybody that can beat that,'” Fleming says, still laughing at their good fortune.
So why Kansas City? The U.S. already lagged the world in fencing, and Kansas City was no Mecca of fencing.
Fleming says Nazlymov was tired of the bureaucracy of high-pressure jobs and of teaching students who brought bad habits from past coaches.
In Kansas City, Nazlymov got the clean slate he wanted. He welcomed Central students to train with elite collegiate fencers and took them to tournaments all over the United States. Two of his proteges — Terrance Lasker and Jeremy Summers — were among the best junior fencers in the country.
According to Poos, Lasker described Nazlymov as something right out of a novel. Nazlymov only knew a couple of basic words and greetings in English. For the first two months, practice was a combination of him pulling arms and straightening backs combined with just one word: “relax, relax.”
Lasker was one of the few African-American students who decided to participate in fencing, in large part because of the opportunity to travel. Summers, on the other hand, was a white suburbanite, representing the type of kid the public school system hoped to attract.
The duo became Central and KC’s best, and by 1994 were among the best junior fencers in the world. Nazlymov’s coaching vision was solidified.
“I fence against his students,” Ivanova says. “So he made some of the greatest American sabre fencers.”
Unfortunately for Summers and Lasker, once they graduated, they needed to pay for much of their fencing ambitions out of pocket. Both ultimately fell short of making the Olympic team in 1996 and 2000.
An ongoing legacy
As it did for Lasker and Summers, the well of money eventually ran dry at Central. Despite the school’s success in fencing, weightlifting and swimming, the Supreme Court put a stop to Clark’s plan in 1995, the same year the pair graduated. Lawmakers said the academic results weren’t following suit and still trailing district and state averages.
Transportation funding was the first thing to go, and with it many suburban white kids stopped attending. Seeing the writing on the wall, Nazlymov left Central and started an academy in Overland Park.
Critics welcomed the spending cuts because they thought the magnet program was excessive and ill-conceived. Supporters said it wasn’t given enough time to thrive and show results.
While Central’s fencing program died, it left a lasting impact on those involved. Today, Lasker coaches a premier fencing academy in Atlanta, while Summers spent more than a decade in sports medicine for USA Fencing.
“We too often look at things in binary ways, and it’s far more complicated than that,” Poos says. “You can debate and find evidence to support or refute magnet schools but for those two kids, what an experience. It changed the trajectory of their lives.”
Nazlymov left the metro in 1999 to take a coaching post at The Ohio State University. Today, he helps out at an academy in Bethesda, Maryland, run by his son and daughter-in-law. He did not respond to a request for an interview.
But like the magnet school effort, Nazlymov left a legacy. In Summers and Lasker of course, but also at Kansas City Fencing Center, the academy he started after his time at Central which is still run by a coach he brought in during his time there.
Or at Heartland Fencing Academy, where students drive from as far as Oklahoma two or more times each week just for practice.
And you can see his lasting impact on Fleming, who at 69, fresh off a rotator cuff injury, is still deeply in love with the game.
“You're caught up in the tactics and the techniques and that sort of thing. You're not even thinking about how, how tired you are or how much longer it is until you get to quit or whatever like that,” Fleming said. “It's just so much fun.”
Today, a spokesperson for USA Fencing described the fencing community in Kansas City as “small but mighty.” In recent years, the metro has hosted a bevy of tournaments, bringing in people from all over the country and even the world.
Earlier this year, Kansas City hosted more than 2,000 people for the North American Cup. During the tournament, Heartland welcomed someone from El Salvador to come and practice.
A fencing bout, growing old, suffering an injury, rehabbing a school’s image or seeing that effort fall apart. These are all challenges or results from which one can draw winners and losers. But in Kansas City, fencing is more than the outcome of a duel — it’s people from all over the world growing community where people can learn life lessons and chase their passions.
