A changing of the En Garde!
CBC
Growing up, Barb Daniel had never heard of fencing.
That was until a fellow student in her Dalhousie University dorm, the only woman on campus who fenced, asked Daniel to give the sport a try.
"I really didn't even know what she meant," Daniel said.
But curious about the "sport with swords," she did give it a try.
"People that would have known me growing up like in high school would never have thought of me as an athlete in any way, shape or form," said Daniel.
Within three years of swinging her first sword, she was competing in the Canada Games.
A few years later, she was a minor official at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.
Daniel downplays her fencing skills in those days, saying she wasn't an exceptional athlete, just one of the few competing at the time.
It wasn't until her coach basically forced her and a few teammates to try coaching that she found her true calling, she said.
"He said, 'If you guys don't start coaching, we can't grow the sport,' and he kind of told us we had to be coaches."
It led Daniel to a career in teaching fencing that has lasted nearly 46 years.
"My very first coaching that I was doing, if you can believe this, I coached fencing at the School for the Blind in Halifax, which was amazingly just an amazing experience," said Daniel.
Learning how to coach wasn't easy.
"I really struggled, probably for the first three or four years of trying to learn what you had to do as a coach, how to get your points across, how to make it fun," she said. "I didn't feel that this was a strength of mine at all."
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