Photos Courtesy of Bizzi Team

It was completely by chance that Holly Buechel ’03 tried fencing when she arrived at Oak Knoll for her freshman year of high school. In fact, she wasn’t entirely sure what fencing was. She had wanted to try out for the basketball team, but she couldn’t participate in the team’s mandatory winter camp. “[The fencing program] was much more relaxed about winter break,” she explained. “I decided to try it, and I fell in love with it, thanks to Oak Knoll.”

But while her introduction to the sport may have been accidental, everything she has accomplished since has not. Fencing has become a lifetime pursuit and — even as Holly refers to it as a hobby — a multiple-award-winning career.

In November, Holly won the Women’s Epee 40+ Gold Medal at the Veteran World Championships in Bahrain. It was her third gold medal of the fencing season and the most recent in a long line of championships that began at Oak Knoll.

On Becoming A Fencing Champion

In 2002, during Holly’s junior year, the Oak Knoll fencing team won the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association (NJSIAA) team title, and Holly was that year’s girls epee champion. It was Oak Knoll’s first state team title in fencing since 1984 and, to date, the school’s only individual championship in the sport. Holly went on to an Ivy League Championship at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a two-time All-American, and a number of national and international honors since then, including as a two-time alternate to the U.S. Olympic Team in Women’s Epee. She is the director of operations for the Cornell University fencing staff and serves as a top-ranked fencing referee.

“I was an athlete growing up in a lot of different sports. Soccer was my main sport at one time, and I think playing sports and being a student just helps you organize. You have to be really disciplined because you have to fit in all of your classwork,” she said. “Going to Oak Knoll, where the classes were way more rigorous than my public [middle] school, made me buckle down and organize so I could fit in practice. I also lived 20 to 25 minutes away, so there was the additional commute time.

“Oak Knoll set me up perfectly for being an NCAA athlete at UPenn because I was already used to doing the time management — finding time for meals, practice, homework, sleep, everything.” Holly graduated from UPenn with two majors: Fine Arts, with a concentration in animation, and Visual Studies, with a concentration in the Psychology and Science of Seeing.

This could be the whole story. But, for Holly, there’s always another story to tell.

On Becoming a Documentary Storyteller

“After college, I was trying to get internships in animation in New York, but most studios were looking for engineers who had coding backgrounds, so it was a little harder for me. I decided to pursue internships that were general post-production, which is the editing side of filmmaking. I did an internship and thought, ‘I really like this.’ And then the stock market crashed in 2008, and the internship I thought would become a job was not going to be a job anymore. I thought, ‘Maybe this is a good time for me to go back to grad school.’”

Armed with a master’s in film editing from the City College of New York, Holly has built an impressive portfolio with a wide array of industry clients, such as HBO, Discovery, Vogue, Bravo, OWN, and the Food Network. She has also done award-winning editing for the NEA. But editing enabled her to learn other aspects of filmmaking, such as cinematography, production, and writing, which was exactly what she needed to direct and produce her own films.

Her short film, Speed of Fencing, received Best Experimental Film honors at the 2013 Big Apple Film Festival. And her documentary Fencing for the Edge, chronicling the journey of a top high school girls’ fencing team, received an honorable mention from the 2024 New Jersey International Film Festival and was nominated by the Seattle Film Festival for Best Sports Documentary Feature.

“I really enjoy documentary the most because of how much storytelling it involves,” she explained. Although her first two films focus on fencing, she wants to explore women in sports more broadly for future projects.

“There’s just so much to learn from athletes, and women’s sports are finally coming into the zeitgeist and having a moment. So let’s tell all of these stories, not just when the Olympics happen but all the time because women are doing sports all the time.”