No foiling Hewlett High School senior Morgan Lee

Woodmere resident is a top-rated fencer who meets all challenges head on

Posted

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and tennis great Serena Williams might not know each other, but for Morgan Lee they are touchstones on the Hewlett High School senior’s pathway to greatness in fencing and a successful life.

“Serena is always said to the be the greatest female athlete of all-time and such an inspiration for women,” said Lee, a Woodmere resident. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a female on the Supreme Court who keeps trying to make a difference.”

At 17, Lee is currently nationally ranked fifth in the 18U Division, 10th in the 21U Division and 22nd in Division 1/ Senior/ Olympic Division. Training five days a week in Brooklyn, she holds a weighted grade point average of over 101 with a course load that includes Advanced Placement calculus, AP chemistry, AP computer science and AP physics.


Lee, who has already verbally committed to Princeton University will pick up her foil-style sword and begin her tournament season this month. Fencing includes three distinct sword styles: Foil is light weight and flexible, epee is heavier and saber is shorter than both and lighter than the epee.


A figure skater since she was 4, Lee was the focus of a 2008 Nassau Herald story when she was 7. In 2010, she began fencing. When the Long Beach Recreation Center, where she skated, was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy two years later, it was decision time in the Lee household.

“There was a local fencing club and my dad had me try it,” Lee said. “It was very physical, a lot of mental toughness and problem solving,” she says about “trading in her skating blades for fencing ones.”  

Transitioning from one sport to another was made easier because of the coaching she received as a skater. “They used to do endless box-jump training and incredible stretches,” her father Kenneth Lee, who works in finance, said about Morgan’s start at the Newbridge Arena in Bellmore. “I think all the core strength and footwork translated well to fencing. Just being able to focus on the instruction and then doing it is a valuable skill to have at that age.”

Lee, like her mother Patricia, is also a talented musician who plays the alto saxophone, cello and sings. Named a New York State School Music Association All-State soloist, Lee could be a one-woman band. And as an experienced international traveler, she could also book the shows.

“She has become a pro at traveling,” said Patricia, director of Woodmere Music Studios. “She had traveled alone to some of these competitions, of course once you get to the venue there is the team to support you. She’s great with packing and knowing the airports and transportation. Not knowing the language is never an issue.”

In one of her college essays Lee recounts the story about traveling between two fencing tournaments. “A rarity that two events line up like this but last December I competed in Turin, Italy in a Senior World Cup which is a two-day event,” Lee wrote. “I had another competition starting the next day in Germany but they overlapped by a day. Although I just knocked out an Austrian Olympian, I lost my next one to a strong Russian fencer and fell one match short in Italy to make the next round there but by that time it was late evening and no flights out of Turin airport to anywhere.

“My father said chances of getting to Germany for the second tournament were bleak. I’m good with my phone though so I furiously went to work. With no taxis around it then became the ‘Amazing Race’ with my father and I running down cobblestone streets with all my gear and luggage bouncing around and we caught a train to Milan, then a midnight bus with border patrol in Germany, and then [with] snow in Stuttgart to catch yet another 3 a.m. local train to the airport waiting for the car rental agency to open there at 7 a.m. Finally, we drove on the Autobahn and made it in time for the last call in Germany. I won bronze on a stage in front of a huge German audience, which ended up being a formal event. People were like ‘Weren’t you just in Italy?’ “Yup.”

It is that relentlessness which has Lee not only knocking on the door of making an Olympic team, but also cracking the mostly male bastion of computer programming. “I have a very strong interest in the tech industry, where there are not enough females and its male dominated,” said Lee, who this past summer attended the Wolfram camp for high school students that focuses on cutting-edge programming, computational thinking and innovative technology. “I want to eventually be an executive at a tech company.” Only 10 percent of the campers were young women, she noted.

Coached by former Olympic fencer and seven-time world champion in foil Dan Kellner, out of his Brooklyn Bridge Fencing Club, Lee has matured under his tutelage since 2015. “She’s grown both in her maturity to be able to handle different situations both tactically and technically,” said Kellner who will be inducted into the U.S. Fencing Hall of Fame in May. “She is a much smarter and athletic fencer.”

That growth also extends to her life as a role model to a pair of younger siblings, Krista, 12 and Claudia, 10, who play the cello, saxophone and violin and are on the Long Island Top Guns travel lacrosse team. “Whether studying habits, working hard or having a passion they have definitely taken some of what they’ve seen and applied it to their own lives, and I hope they will be very successful and continue to work hard.”
Lee’s 2018-’19 fencing season gets under way with the Senior Division 1 nationals in Milwaukee, Oct. 13 to 15.