How Snoop Dogg, Comic-Con, and cold calls are growing USA Fencing

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

PHIL ANDREWS: We have to figure out those unique ways in. We have to figure out what we can do that nobody else can. Sometimes that’s tough, but we’re not afraid of an idea and chasing it down. The biggest opportunity that lies before us is this unique excitement for sport in the next 10 years in the United States, particularly around the Los Angeles Games.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Phil Andrews, CEO of U.S.A. Fencing. It may seem strange to talk about fencing right now. It’s hardly the world’s largest sport, especially after the global phenomenon of World Cup soccer. But U.S.A. Fencing is actually having a moment, and talking to Phil about what it takes to scale a niche brand is both instructive and unexpectedly fun. Fencing is one of only five Olympic sports that dates back to the beginning of the modern Games in 1896. With the 2028 Games in Los Angeles on the horizon, U.S.A. Fencing faces a key inflection point of both opportunity and risk. So what kind of fun is U.S.A. Fencing getting into? To rev up attention, Phil is appearing at Comic-Con, tapping Snoop Dogg and leaning into Hollywood swordplay from Star Wars to the classic The Princess Bride. He’s even collaborating with other what might be called orphan sports to create a collective that appeals to sponsors. U.S.A. Fencing’s experience shows how every CEO needs to be on guard when it comes to expanding beyond core customers. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m here with Phil Andrews, CEO of U.S.A. Fencing. Phil, great to be with you.

ANDREWS: Thanks, Bob. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

SAFIAN: I have to confess that I am not a fencer.

ANDREWS: No.

SAFIAN: To me, épée is a word that shows up in crossword puzzles and, I guess, in scenes from Sherlock Holmes movies. Is fencing that rarefied, or am I being hopelessly parochial? Should I be picking up fencing like folks have flocked to pickleball?

ANDREWS: Yes, you should.

SAFIAN: Do you look at pickleball and say, “Why couldn’t that have been fencing?”

ANDREWS: We’re becoming the fastest-growing sport in the Olympic and Paralympic world, so my answer is yes. It’s a sport from 6 to 86, and of course I know you’re closer to the 6.

SAFIAN: Thank you.

ANDREWS: We have veteran fencing for the over-40s. We have divisions for basically every age group. So absolutely you should be trying fencing, and of course I would say that. I’m a little bit biased. Ultimately, the difference between us and pickleball is that you need to be wearing some safety equipment in fencing that you don’t necessarily need in pickleball. I think we’re very different from pickleball, but we’re also growing really fast, perhaps in a slightly different way than they are.

Copy LinkWhy niche sports grow faster together

SAFIAN: In the lead-up to the 2028 Olympics in LA, you’ve been advocating for sports like fencing that get less attention, even though it’s growing, as you say, to band together. You pulled together five sports into what you call the United Sports Collective. That’s fencing, squash, cycling, sailing and rowing. This sort of collaboration doesn’t generally happen, as I understand it?

ANDREWS: No. Historically, national governing bodies, and to give a very brief explanation, an organization called the International Olympic Committee, or the IOC, owns and operates the Olympic Games, and there’s the IPC for the Paralympic Games. Underneath that, you’ve got an international federation that manages each sport around the world, and they mainly write the rules and hold world championships. Then each sport has an organization — in this case, U.S.A. Fencing — that runs the sport domestically. Historically, national governing bodies, or NGBs, haven’t really worked together very closely. So when we founded the USC, and we’ve now added lacrosse to that group, the idea was to collaborate more, particularly around commercial partnerships. That’s how we started it, but it’s actually turned into a bit of a best-practices unit where we have very similar demographics across those national governing bodies, and we face relatively similar problems.

SAFIAN: So you work together to raise money, and you’re also sharing information about what’s working for you.

ANDREWS: Absolutely. Of course, we’re still doing that individually as U.S.A. Fencing, as U.S. Rowing and as U.S.A. Cycling, but it’s a great place for us to be able to exchange ideas and leads. Especially when you think about the commercial landscape, when you think about, “I need to target X demographic,” you don’t think, “I want to target a rower or a squash player or a lacrosse player or a fencer.” You think, “I want to target the demographic that works for my business.” So more often than not, there’s an opportunity where we can be stronger together across those different national governing bodies. Similarly, we can exchange what’s working in rowing and what’s working in fencing, and sometimes those won’t be the same thing. Sometimes it’s good information that makes you think, “Oh, wait, that’s a great idea. I can adapt that for what I’m doing in rowing or what I’m doing in cycling or what I’m doing in lacrosse,” for example.

SAFIAN: As I understand it, you used to run U.S.A. Weightlifting.

ANDREWS: I did.

SAFIAN: You didn’t do this there. U.S.A. Weightlifting is not one of these programs that’s part of this. So for the sports that are part of this grouping, what are the similar challenges they have? What are the similar demographics?

ANDREWS: If you think about rowing, fencing, sailing, and perhaps squash and lacrosse as well, we’re all national organizations, but we have a focus on the Northeast. We’re strongest in New York City, Boston, DC and Philadelphia, and that’s common across those organizations. They’re also NCAA-focused, collegiate-focused organizations. To talk about U.S.A. Weightlifting, it was a wonderful experience spending 10 years in that sport, and I love that community, but it’s very different from fencing, both in the way that we’re set up geographically and, frankly, in the affluence and demographics of the sport. We’ve got a lot more in common as U.S.A. Fencing with U.S. Rowing than we necessarily do with U.S.A. Weightlifting, which may also have more in common with U.S.A. Boxing or U.S.A. Judo than it has with us.

Copy LinkSelling sponsors on audience over scale

SAFIAN: When you took over at U.S.A. Fencing four years ago, in 2022, the program had virtually no corporate partners, right?

ANDREWS: No.

SAFIAN: You had no marketing budget. You had no brand awareness. You just started cold-calling CMOs.

ANDREWS: Pretty much.

SAFIAN: That must have been pretty hard, hearing a lot of nos. What was your pitch?

ANDREWS: It still is.

SAFIAN: Did you convince anyone?

ANDREWS: I think there are different ways you sell partnerships in an organization like U.S.A. Fencing. We are a niche organization across a very large country. If you think about the Seattle Seahawks or the Denver Broncos or the New York Rangers, the first place you’re going, if you’re any of those organizations, is New York, Denver or Seattle, and you’re talking to the big companies that want to support their local team in that city. We can’t do that because we don’t have that clear regional focus.

Challenge No. 2 is education. What is fencing? Why should I support fencing? Who is a fencer? To your point, is épée in my crossword? Is it a piece of bread that I get at a cafe? A lot of people know lightsabers from Star Wars. They may know champagne sabers. Do they know it’s an actual sporting weapon that originated on the battlefield? Those are educational items to get over. When you’re starting to cold-call people with exactly zero partners, and they ask, “Hey, who else is doing this?” “Well, right now, nobody,” is a challenging answer to give. We can go into our own database, the alumni, and say, “OK, who’s a fencer? Where have they gone now? They went to Harvard, they went to Princeton, they went to Notre Dame, they went to Ohio State. Where are they now, and what are they doing?” That always opens the door a little bit better.

We’re also leaning into lots of really interesting ways, particularly ahead of ’28, to market the sport. We’re doing the first-ever Olympic and Paralympic sport Creator Showdown in New York City in September. We were the only sport, to my knowledge, to ever have a panel at Comic-Con, of all things. And to your point about the sponsorship side of the business, we’re seeing more people open the door rather than just saying, “Why? What would I do fencing for?” So we’ve had Bell Bank, we’ve had Avis, we’ve had Hilton, we’ve had Ingenius Prep, we’ve had Dwight School Online. Rosetta Stone is a big name. Epicure Foods, Miguel and Jets.

SAFIAN: And are they all drawn by the same idea — like the affluence of your members — or are there different things for different ones of them?

ANDREWS: Different horses for different courses, and of course I would use that more if I were an equestrian. For some of them, it’s an X’s and O’s issue. Let’s take Hilton. We are a sport that travels almost every weekend. I have fencing parents who tell me it’s a lifestyle, not a sport. So ultimately, Hilton is looking to capture that business. They’re also looking to gain leisure business from that as well.

Ingenious and Dwight and Masters Academy International are more attracted by the educational aspect of our sport, of people who are ultimately trying to get into these top-level universities. There are others who come in because they’re attracted to the idea of our connection with the film industry, thinking through the Star Wars connection, The Princess Bride connection. Those have opened doors for us. So it is a lot of horses for different courses.

Because our main attraction is around who, not how many. In other words, we’re not really selling corporate partners impressions; we’re selling who our end users are. We did a lot of work and a lot of research on the data that sits behind U.S.A. Fencing, and we’ve been able to really match the demographics of brands to the demographics of fencing, and I think that’s where we’ve seen our most recent successes. We know that our audience leans more into the luxury watch industry or even into the home improvement world. We know the level of home improvement tendencies in our audience. We also know how many graduate degrees we have and the range of native languages we have. And so Rosetta Stone was really persuaded by the data that we have rather than necessarily the volume of impressions they’re going to see.

SAFIAN: You’re very calm about all this, but it also sounds, if I listen to your words, that when you came in four years ago, this was a sport that needed some serious change, and you’re trying all kinds of things. You’re throwing out all kinds of things to see what’s going to get traction.

ANDREWS: That’s not completely untrue. We are taking some very unusual tactics: Creator Showdown, the Comic-Con collaboration, the way that we’re bringing in our ambassadors for the games, our collaboration with iHeartMedia, our collaboration with NextShark, all of these ways that we’re bringing fencing to people. Yes, we had some problems when I came in in ’22. We had some governance issues, transparently. Unfortunately, we were coming out of a sexual abuse crisis at the time that was famous around the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games. We had staff that was down to an absolute skeleton. We’re still lean, but we’re no longer a skeleton. We had a sport in a place where it was almost embarrassed of itself in some ways, and it’s a sport to be proud of. It’s one of the original Olympic sports. It’s one of the most cinematic sports in the country. It’s statistically the best sport to get into in order to go to an Ivy League school. And you have to be really smart to be in fencing because it’s physical chess, so there’s a lot to be passionate about.

Copy LinkRebranding a sport through bold experiments

SAFIAN: U.S.A. Fencing has had its challenges, which makes its renovation even more unexpected. What Phil Andrews has done is crystallize his commercial proposition by leaning into the elite nature of his community. But if the long-term goal is to grow the sport, then how does elite status square with expanding reach? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, U.S.A. Fencing’s Phil Andrews shared techniques for growing the commercial ecosystem of a niche brand. Now he talks about how he’s building awareness by leaning into Hollywood, from Star Wars to K-pop demon hunters, the impact of a new professional fencing league, and more. Let’s jump back in. I mentioned earlier Sherlock Holmes movies. You’ve brought up Star Wars and Comic-Con. Hollywood may be a prime cultural center for swordplay. How does that help or impact your marketing efforts? Are you actively cultivating that? Do you want fencing to have its F1 moment?

ANDREWS: We are using every tool that we can in this wonderful window we have, where there’s heightened interest in the Olympic and Paralympic Games ahead of a home U.S. Games. Particularly now following the World Cup, I think that excitement’s only increased. We’ve got a database we put together of over 600 people who have wielded a blade in a film, and you see an interesting number of fencers actually come into the creative industries who were legitimate high school or college fencers. So people like Jerry O’Connell, Angelina Jolie and Greta Gerwig were actually fencers as kids, who went through our system and then went on to be, of course, who they are today.

And there’s actually a duel in Star Wars where it briefly goes from being what we know as lightsaber, that typical sort of very broad movement, to being actual épée. And that’s because Bob Anderson, who was an Olympian in fencing, a British Olympian, was the main person behind Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars and so on. He and a colleague of his, Nick Gillard, essentially invented lightsaber from a combination of sabre and épée. I think it’s in Revenge of the Sith — I might be incorrect in saying that — but they actually change it to épée briefly between Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen. And you’re right, we’re leaning into that. We have ambassadors, people like Mandy Patinkin, of course famous for Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, all the way through to people like Orlando Bloom, who of course played Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean.

SAFIAN: Yeah, and when there’s a cultural phenomenon like K-pop demon hunters who use swords, does that inspire kids to say, “I want to be a fencer”?

ANDREWS: It does.

SAFIAN: Do you see that?

ANDREWS: We do. Wednesday on Netflix is another one, where Wednesday was a fencer played by Jenna Ortega. We see that a great deal, and actually, funnily enough, Morticia is played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, who of course also was in Zorro. So we very much do. I think the issue you see, compared to The Hunger Games, which grew U.S.A. Archery by 80% at one point, is that we have a job on our hands to link those two things together so people understand, oh, not only does that look really cool, I can go to my local fencing club and try that.

SAFIAN: Because people just aren’t as aware of fencing as an option for them.

ANDREWS: I think that’s right. The issue is connection, and I’ll give you a good working business example. We have a great relationship with iHeartMedia, and we did a great advertising exchange with them where they became a sponsor of ours. In exchange, they helped publicize fencing through advertising. That drew more people to tryfencing.org than we got during the entire Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games, and here’s the reason: because you’re drawing that connection between seeing this and how to go and try it, and that is the critical piece that we have to bridge, both for the Olympic and Paralympic Games itself, but also for the appearance of sword work, and particularly fencing, in entertainment.

Copy LinkTurning on-screen swordplay into real participation

SAFIAN: I can’t help noting your accent. You’re clearly not native to the United States. How does a Brit, I guess, end up at the helm of a U.S. national sports team?

ANDREWS: What do you mean? My accent’s completely from Alabama. No, I’m kidding. It’s the weird story of how a British ice hockey guy becomes the CEO—

SAFIAN: British ice hockey, OK.

ANDREWS: Oh yes, so it gets weirder. I’m an ice hockey goalie by trade, by sport. The shortest version I can give you is I worked with Team U.S.A. in London on the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, hosting a lot of things like the training center and the media center. When I came over here in ’12, ’13, there was a lot of opportunity at U.S.A. Weightlifting, and over 10 years we turned that sport into a real force to be reckoned with internationally and a great business domestically, growing the sport by three or four times and taking us to being one of the top three teams in the world for both men and women. So I’m very proud of that time.

Copy LinkHow colleges become growth engines for fencing

SAFIAN: As you talked about fencing, I was looking at the collegiate level. There are only about 45 schools with varsity fencing programs. Basketball, by comparison, has more than 1,000. Is that part of what you’re trying to change, or is 45 schools enough? And how do you change it?

ANDREWS: That is a lot about building relationships with athletic directors, presidents and, to some extent, boards of trustees. It’s the same thing as the brand discussion we talked about earlier: What’s in it for them? For some universities, that’s about prestige. Most of our schools are among the top schools in the nation, so they want to be seen alongside them. For some, that’s around enrollment. There are fewer students available to go to college than there used to be. We’ve already announced Fairleigh Dickinson adding a team, City College of New York, Arcadia University, but also Trinity College in Connecticut, which is a very high-end NESCAC, a high-end D3 small college. And we created a women’s championship in collaboration with the NCAA. It used to be that there was a coed championship. Now, for the first time, in March of this past year, we had a women’s championship. We’ve now got over 100 more college places per year. There’s also well over 100 clubs at different universities across the country.

SAFIAN: A lot of sports are getting cut as opposed to adding. Can you walk us through the math? You mentioned Trinity College. I know you guys recently gave them a $75,000 grant.

ANDREWS: We did.

SAFIAN: But the idea is that those programs will become self-sustaining and net positive for the school.

ANDREWS: It’s the value of the enrollment. You have some college teams that are 70 fencers deep. So then you do the math: 70 times the amount of tuition that’s bringing into the school, and that’s pretty big. In the case of Trinity, they saw a fit. There’s a locational aspect for them. They happen to be sitting right between Boston and New York City, two of the best fencing markets in the country. They know that they can get a full team recruited into that college at an appropriate academic level for that college. Why $75,000? That $75,000 really was covering startup costs, and it’s not going to cover 100% of their startup costs, but it covers a significant enough amount that it’s a true partnership between Trinity College and U.S.A. Fencing. And those things didn’t really happen, probably four or five years ago, in fencing or most other sports.

SAFIAN: Growing U.S.A. Fencing’s membership, participation in fencing — I mean, you’ve set a goal, I think, to nearly double it by the LA ’28 Games. You have this choice, right, between opening up the idea of who the sport is for or leaning into the places where the strength is now?

ANDREWS: It’s the same decision you really make in any business. I want to grow the business in the way it appeals, but I also want to be focused on where I’m successful. We are deepest in New York. We have LA-based fencers, along with Boston and DC and Houston, some of these other major cities for fencing. We certainly don’t ignore Fargo or Omaha or Iowa, but we do focus a little of our energy on where we’re going to get, not so much the biggest bang for our buck in money terms, but honestly, in time terms. We have 20 employees. That’s it. That’s the people doing this work. And we have clubs all over the country doing part of that work. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to discredit them in any way. But they are certainly focused very locally; we’re focused nationally. We are now over 50,000. The goal is 70,000. We’re adding normally about 7,000 members over this next season and then about 10,000 in the final season of that push.

And as I said, the key is bringing awareness to the sport and then, critically, the connection to the sport, so putting a sword into people’s hands. You can probably make a start, and it’s a really fun thing to try. We’re also bringing it into corporate wellness now, where we’re bringing team building together in New York City. Again, partly because of why New York, partly because of the sheer volume of businesses in New York, fencers in those businesses, and of course the volume of Olympians, coaches and clubs that we have in New York City. And what I tell people is, “It’s a bit like piano.” If you go in and try piano for the first time, you’re going to be able to do some scales, but you’re probably not going to be able to play Carnegie Hall the next day. We’re the same way. You can go in, and you can be happily stabbing a friend in about 15 minutes flat. Very easy to try, very interesting to try, but difficult to perfect.

Copy LinkMaking fencing easier to watch and follow

SAFIAN: For a lot of sports, the spectator side is what draws and expands the universe. I know there’s a new professional fencing league, the World Fencing League, launched in LA. Is that connected to USA Fencing? Does it sit outside the Olympic structure?

ANDREWS: It does sit outside the Olympic structure, and there are some advantages to that. It’s founded by a gentleman named Miles Chamley-Watson, who’s a three-time Olympian and world champion. He still is an active national team member. We are a partner of theirs. We are very supportive of the WFL. Miles has had some fortunate experiences in his life. One of those is his best friend is Lewis Hamilton, or Sir Lewis Hamilton. So Sir Lewis and his other half, Kim Kardashian, were both at that launch, and of course, that brought eyeballs to the sport.

SAFIAN: Is fencing a good spectator sport?

ANDREWS: I think in the right context, yes. You always see it get a fairly large amount of airtime at the Olympic Games. Of course, it helps that the U.S. does well, but it does get a lot of play at the Games. It’s got a very unique aesthetic to it. I think that’s part of it. Ultimately, some of the technology is critical to being able to help people understand fencing.

Fencers don’t necessarily want to see the technology following the sword or the tip because they understand fencing, but for non-fencers, it’s really useful. I feel the same way about what happened in hockey with the technology that followed the puck. I don’t want to see that. I was a goalie. I’m trained to follow the puck with my eye, so if I could turn it off, I would. But for non-fencers, it’s a beautiful way to help them understand the sport.

SAFIAN: It’s interesting how, to grow a sport, sometimes it’s uncomfortable for the purists, even though that helps the sport reach and grow. Even in the NBA, I remember people saying, “We’re not going to have a 3-point shot. That’s the ABA,” for people of my generation who remember what that is. But these things do sometimes help a sport expand, and I guess you have to manage some of that too, letting it be a little less rarefied if it’s going to reach new places.

ANDREWS: A lot of people have said over the years that fencing can’t be marketed. Well, tell that to the people in Italy and France and Korea and Japan and Hong Kong, where in those places it’s one of the biggest spectator sports. You can market a sport. You can make this sport, quotation marks, “cool,” make it a place to be, make it a place where kids go home to their high school and say they went to a national championship in fencing and are the envy of that school. That’s the goal. We can’t throw multimillion-dollar marketing budgets at things, so we have to figure out how we grow using what we have uniquely. That’s been the art form of growing USA Fencing.

SAFIAN: You’re deploying a lot of the techniques that we hear entrepreneurs and startups use to try to grow and build with whatever they can and maintain their distinctiveness as an advantage in doing that.

ANDREWS: Bob, that’s precisely what we’re doing because we can’t think old school. Somebody described the thinking that we have the other day, and I quite like this: Some people are out of the box; USA Fencing questions why there’s a box. It’s exactly the startup mentality. We have to be scrappy. We have to figure out those unique ways in. We have to figure out what we can do that nobody else can. Sometimes that’s tough, but we’re not afraid of an idea and chasing it down. Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, I think it is, came out last month, and sure enough, we reached out to Ubisoft and did a collaboration with them where we had two of our fencers critique the technique of the computer game-generated individuals. Almost a million people saw that and therefore experienced our fencers. The underlying message was also, go and try fencing.

Copy LinkWhat success at LA 2028 should unlock

SAFIAN: As you look ahead to the 2028 Olympics, what would a successful Games look like for you, for USA Fencing?

ANDREWS: The first is the obvious one: the field of play. We want to do well. We want to win. We’ve got a great team. We’re defending Olympic champions, defending world champions, and so that’s exciting. On the business side, we ranked sixth for earned media out of the sports in Paris, up from 12th in Tokyo. A lot of that came through relationship building. It came through building relationships with people who can bring eyeballs to us. So the first sport that Snoop Dogg tried at the Games was fencing, and we had a large part in making that happen. Flavor Flav fenced, and part of that was he wanted tickets to foil. So we said, “Great. You now need to fence Lawrence Scruggs.” To my surprise, he said, “Great. I’m in.” So he did. A lot of people saw fencing, as well as our building traditional media relationships with NBC, ABC, CNN and so on. The biggest opportunity that lies before us is this unique excitement for sport in the next 10 years in the United States, but particularly around the Los Angeles Games for us. We want to see medals, sure.

Then we want to see those medals and those experiences translate into people going, “Wow, that’s inspired me, and this is a sport that speaks to me, and I want to go and try it.” The big catchphrase for the London 2012 Games was inspiring a generation. It doesn’t happen by accident. You’ve got to be deliberate about it, and that is our job. LA28 is not going to do it for us. They’re going to be part of it. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee is not going to do it for us. NBC isn’t going to do it for us. It’s our job, USA Fencing, to go out and make sure we inspire the next generation of fencers for the United States.

SAFIAN: Phil, this was great. Thanks so much for doing it.

ANDREWS: Thank you.