Brief Data Visualization of the New Unified Points List
I finally had a chance to sit down and play with the new Unified Points List through USA Fencing. Immediately, I was drawn to how powerful the data could be - here, we can see just how many people have competed over the past year at different levels, per gender, per weapon, per Senior/Junior/Cadet categories.
Today, I am only going to go over some of the interesting things I found when exploring the data. I focus specifically on the Senior Unified Points Lists - I do not go into Junior or Cadet. While some portions show all six categories, I specifically dive into saber more often as we are a saber only club.
A National View
People are often curious about how many members USA Fencing has, and how many compete. While I focus on the Senior points list only, I wanted to look at the split by weapons and gender.
Men’s Epee (3551 competitors, 33.3%) clearly has the lion’s share of competitors. Combined, Men’s Epee and Men’s Foil (2217 competitors, 20.8%) make up over 50% of all competitors. The lowest category for participation is Women’s Saber (920 competitors, 8.6%). Of those competing in Senior events, only 30.4% are in the Women’s Category, with 69.6% in the Men’s Category.
A Regional View
Next, let’s look at how the Regions all stack up against each other.
No surprises there - the most amount of competitors are in Region 3, which includes the most population-dense part of the United States. The saber-specific diagram below roughly echoes the above.
Fence St. Louis’s View
So, where does our fencing club, Fence St. Louis, fit in to all of this?
The diagram above shows all the saber fencers in USA Fencing, down to how many we have here in the St. Louis division, down to how many in our own club by Women’s and Men’s. In our division, our fencers make up 61.9% of the saber competitors. While not shown in the diagrams, there are 117 Women’s Saber competitors in Region 2, and 211 Men’s Saber competitors. Of those, we have 12.8% of the Women’s Saber competitors in our region, and 5.2% of the Men’s saber competitors.
Looking just at our division by weapon/gender categories, I also thought we had a pretty interesting stat. Of the 30 Women’s competitors of any weapon in the St. Louis division, 15 (50%!!) are specifically Fence St. Louis Women’s Saber competitors. We also have more Senior Women’s Saber competitors than Men’s at our club, which was interesting as well. We are doing something special with preparing our women and girls for fencing in competitions!
Further Questions
I would love to know some of the data for fencers who are not competing - such as, how many Senior-age members do not appear on the Unified Points List?
It will be interesting to see how this changes by the end of the 2026-2027 season.
Comparing some of the Regional data to population data could be fun, but that was out of my reach for this quick post.
Caveats
All data points are accurate to 9/18/2026 - obviously this will update and change as the season goes on!
Gender expansive USA Fencing members appear under sex assigned at birth, not preferred gender.
I removed any fencers representing countries other than USA.
Please keep in mind that the same fencer could have competed in multiple weapons, which means some individuals may appear in multiple categories - this just provides a snapshot of how many competitors are in each category.
In some places the numbers do not match (for example USA Fencing under National View is 10667, and under Regional View is 10708). I do not know if USA Fencing ran an update while I was putting this together. I could not figure out the discrepancies, but they’re so small that I feel the overall snapshot is still good.
