Epee Coach
Coach Matt won the 1989 U. S. National Championship in Team Men’s Epee. That year he was nationally ranked 10th in epee. He also won a silver medal at the Olympic Sports Festival in Team Men’s Epee. Coach Matt’s coaching experience includes 3 years at the University of Notre Dame. While there, he coached the Irish to two NCAA national championship titles as well as the Great Lakes Fencing Championships. Prior to Notre Dame, Coach Matt spent four years as a varsity letterman for Penn State University, where he trained under Hall of Fame Coach Maxwell Garret. At Penn State, Coach Matt was made captain of the fencing team. He took consecutive gold medals at the North Atlantic Fencing Championships in both foil and epee, each time qualifying for the NCAA championship tournament.  He became an NCAA finalist and an All-American. Coach Matt was inducted into the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame and named Penn State’s most valuable fencer.
Coach Matt has fenced epee and foil simultaneously. For example, in 1974, he competed in the U.S. Junior Olympics and is the only competitor to reach the finals of his events in both foil and epee. Rather than choosing to withdraw from one of the events, he chose to fence in both finals simultaneously, and, wearing both foil and epee body cords, went from foil bout to epee bout till the finals were over. Â Matt placed 4th in foil and 8th in epee.
Coach Matt moved to Europe to compete internationally in foil, training at the world famous Fecht-Club Tauberbischofsheim, and the Olympischer Fechtclub in Bonn, Germany. Matt traveled with the Bonn foil team and competed in World Cups and regional tournaments around the world.
Coach Matt graduated from Notre Dame Law School and has been engaged in law and the legal system for 35 years, many of them as a trial lawyer. Matt says that being a trial lawyer is a lot like fencing, but it moves slower and not as tiring.