Written by sports information director, Adam Levin '94/MS '21

For most Division III teams, competing against opponents from scholarship programs and other Division I schools is a rare opportunity. When you have the chance to meet a Harvard or a Duke, a Notre Dame or a North Carolina, you have the chance to build memories for a lifetime. 

For Bill Shipman, the long-time coach of Brandeis Fencing, it’s the matches - and the wins - against those opponents that stand out over a 34-year career that will see him enshrined into the Brandeis Hall of Fame. 

“When I got the job, I remember the Harvard coach congratulated me on getting hired, but was a little bit dismissive of our team,” Shipman said. “The next year, we beat them, and that felt really good.”

“Coach Shipman prepared us very well for competition, but one of his most underrated qualities is the way he let us self-motivate,” said Julian Cardillo ‘14, a three-time NCAA qualifier in foil and team captain as a senior. During his senior campaign, the Judges defeated Duke in Durham, North Carolina. “Before the schedule was even finalized, he told us to circle Duke on the calendar… He knew some of those bigger meets started many months before we showed up to compete.” 

A native of North Carolina, Shipman played baseball and basketball at East Henderson High School. He got his start in fencing thanks to the physical education requirement at the University of North Carolina. The testing for placement into PE classes tabbed Shipman for soccer, swimming, wrestling and fencing. 

“The fencing coach came around and looked at everyone who had gotten placed into the fencing class,” Shipman recalled. 

“He looked at me and saw that I was athletic and asked, ‘How would you like to earn a letter for Carolina?’

“I said, ‘Sure!’”

Shipman went on to get degrees from UNC in journalism and education, spending an extra year in Chapel Hill to finish his  second degree.His mother was a teacher, so he hoped to follow in her footsteps in one way or another. Shipman followed a fellow Tar Heel to Clemson as a graduate assistant for one year. The Tigers’ varsity program didn’t last very long, and after a year, Shipman saw fencing at an elevated level when he joined an Ivy League program, the University of Pennsylvania, as an assistant coach. 

With his background as a teacher and a coach, Shipman found himself in charge of the junior varsity team at Penn. “Even then, even at that level, they were still taking good athletes and making them into fencers with the j.v. team,” Shipman said. He used the opportunity at the Ivy League school to get to know people across the country at the higher levels of NCAA fencing.

After helping the Quakers win the men’s NCAA championship in 1981, and with the contacts he he’d developed within the Ivy League, Shipman was chosen by Brandeis to lead the program following the retirement of another Hall of Famer, Lisel Judge - who was part of his hiring committee - and Joe Pechinsky. 

After working with national champions at Penn, it would take time for Shipman to build a Brandeis program to the level of success that he was hoping to achieve. “It wasn’t easy at first,” Shipman remembered. “Recruiting was difficult. It was kind of like at UNC, where I had to do a lot of training on campus, but I enjoyed it. It was always fun to work with Brandeis students.”

It was unlikely that Brandeis would reach the levels of success of the Ivy League schools during Shipman’s tenure, given the history and resources that those schools had behind their fencing programs, but Shipman realized there was no reason the Judges couldn’t be at the top of the next tier of schools - smaller schools like MIT and Vassar, and even a place like North Carolina, who didn’t carry the tradition of the powerhouse programs. “MIT was quite good back around the time I arrived,” Shipman said. “We could point to them and say we could reach that level of success.”

He points to a couple of milestone achievements that he felt demonstrated that the program had arrived. “The women won their first University Athletic Association title in 1988,” he noted. “That gave the team a real boost of confidence, I think. They really kept improving from that point on.” 

The men followed with a UAA crown in 1989. Coupled with a 14-13 win over Penn, it showed that the Judges were able to compete with any team on any level. The Judges started competing with MIT and Brown for New England Conference championships. There were years when Brandeis and NYU were the only Division III schools to send fencers to nationals. That opened up the recruiting pipelines to be able to recruit eventual All-Americans and Hall of Famers like Terrence Garguilo ‘89, Mike Mayer ‘94 and Tim Morehouse ‘00. 

The addition of the Gosman Athletic Center was a boon to the program’s success as well. “Having a dedicated fencing room was helpful,” Shipman said. It also allowed Brandeis to host the NCAA Championships, which it did for the first time in 1994 - when he was named the United State Fencing Coaches Association National Coach of the Year. Brandeis has hosted three times since, in 1999, 2004 and 2016.

“I was very grateful to be able to host those championships,” Shipman recalled. “I was thankful that the administration allowed us to do that. It gave us a lot of visibility in the fencing world. People who might not have heard of Brandeis got a chance to come to campus and see how well we did as hosts, and I’m sure it has helped our reputation, to put us in their minds as a fencing school where they might not have otherwise.” 

Over the past few decades, fencing has become more popular in the United States, and Shipman was able to capitalize on increased support from the Brandeis administration to recruit from all over the country. “We really got tremendous support over the last few years that I was there,” Shipman said. “From recruiting, to athletic training, to the ability to host tournaments, I really felt like we were given the opportunity to be successful. Brandeis likes fencing - they embrace the tradition - they always treated me well.”