Head Coach - Tigran Shaginian

Tigran Shaginian

Head Coach​

Tigran is a four-time Russian national champion. Tigran has been fencing since the age of 7. Winner of the European Championship (1981) in the team competition and several other international tournaments, he earned a place on the Soviet Union's Goodwill Games Pentathlon Team in 1984, proving him to be a top athlete in fencing, shooting, horse riding, running and swimming.
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Tigran founded SWORDS in 1997. With over 40 years of competing and coaching experience, his students have competed on the USA Fencing Cadet, Junior and Veteran World Cup teams, taken Gold at the Junior Olympics, and earned many national titles.  His students consistently rank in the top eight in the nation in Division 1, Junior, Cadet, and Y14.  Tigran's students have gone on to fence at Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Columbia, Notre Dame, and the Air Force Academy, to name a few. 

Jacques Lacour - French Master of Fencing and Master USFCA

Jacques Lacour

French Master of Fencing and Master USFCA

Strip Coach

French Master of Fencing and Master USFCA with over 20 years of experience coaching French national champions. As the head coach of "Cercle D'escrime de Chalon en Champagne", he was coaching the actual world champion Yannick Borel for the French Junior Nationals in 2008  as well as Fabrice  Jeannet, Jerome Jeannet, and Jean Michel Lucenay. (These fencers later won the gold medal in the men's team epee fencing, in the Beijing 2008 Olympics)

He has been the coach of the French team and won the European Team Club Cup three times. He has also coached female cadet fencers, several of whom have won the French Championship in Cadet. Under his coaching, many of his students were able to attend prestigious colleges like the Air Force Academy, Notre Dame, UNLV, Stanford, John Hopkins, St John, and more...

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Jason Pinchuk

Coach, Calabasas​

A three-time Junior Olympian and a PCC semi-finalist, Jason has won numerous medals at Senior divisional and sectional tournaments from Southern California to Northern Ohio. He has coached Junior Olympians in the Cadet and Junior age-groups, and the 2010 Senior Women’s Pacific Coast Champion. Jason was head epee coach at UCLA for a number of years, where his students achieved individual and team medals in intercollegiate NCAA competition.

Our coaches and our students strive to train harder and be better. We are always learning and growing together. One of the purposes of this is to help our younger students get into and attend the top universities in the country, once they are ready of course. Fencing is not the only way but is one of the ways to attend some of the best Ivy, private, and public institutions in the nation. We are an Epee only club as we believe that focusing on one discipline helps to strengthen our club and fencers.

Our fencers have or are currently attending: Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Notre Dame, Stanford, Barnard, Penn State, Ohio State, St. John's, UC Berkeley, and UCSD.

They have also been accepted to : Princeton, Yale, Brown, McGill, UCLA, Pepperdine, UC Irvine, and many others. 

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