‘Take the hit and recover later’

Gillian Litynski is at the top of her form in fencing, as the first-ever ACC women’s saber champion, and in academics, as a prestigious Hillman Scholar for Nursing Innovation in the School of Nursing.

Student-athletes have enough trouble achieving this balanced success, but the captain of the Tar Heel fencing team did it with a hit already scored against her. Litynski is dyslexic.

When difficulties arise, Litynski has a strategy that has worked for her. “It sounds horrible,” she said, “but you take the hit and recover later.”

Litynski discovered her dyslexia and the sport of fencing as a child growing up in Niskayuna, New York. In third grade, she had trouble reading, but not because she needed glasses. She was diagnosed with dyslexia, a learning disorder that made reading and writing difficult for this intelligent girl.

“It’s always been annoying, to say the least,” she said. “It held me back the most in elementary school.”

After a long day of struggling to read and write, Litynski looked forward to thrusting and parrying in an after-school enrichment program. The instructor, impressed with her skills, encouraged the 10-year-old to stick with fencing. 

“So I said, ‘Mom, I’ve got to keep doing this. I’m good at something!’” she said.

Litynski now knows she didn’t begin to get really good at the sport until her sophomore year in high school when she began training with Carolyn Washburn-Lapham, a new fencing coach who also became a role model. In her senior year, she finished third in the Division 1A Nationals.

As Litynski became more adept with the saber, she continued to struggle in the classroom. Her teachers made some accommodations for her, but not the proctors of standardized tests. The SATs – with their time limit, blocks of text and a sea of little bubbles to fill in – were particularly problematic for a dyslexic.

“It was stressful getting into colleges because I wanted them to look at my GPA but not my SAT because the SAT didn’t give me extended time,” Litynski said. She was finally allowed more time to take the SAT – the day after she was accepted at Carolina.

Litynski’s specialty is the saber, the largest and heaviest blade in fencing, with a flat blade and knuckle guard. In the 17th century, the saber was the weapon of choice for the cavalry. Because of this history, the saber’s target areas in fencing competitions are from the hips up. “You wouldn’t want to kill the horse,” Litynski explained. “You’d want to get the person and then steal the horse afterward.”

Saber is different from the more familiar foil fencing. Opponents stand farther apart, move around more and use cutting or thrusting motions. Fencing sounds more dangerous than it is, she said. In fencing, “black and blues are common,” but she got worse injuries in high school track.

Suited up for a match in her protective fencing jacket and helmet, Litynski looks like a cross between a medieval knight and an astronaut. Before a match, you can glimpse her short blond hair and bright blue eyes behind the plexiglass. But when she lowers the metal screen of her helmet, all her fencing opponent can see is a determined and quick-footed adversary charging, slashing and retreating.

The rigor of being a student-athlete caused more problems for Litynski at Carolina than her dyslexia did. Learning actually became easier with help from Accessibility Services and more flexibility in class. Because of her interest in global public health, she majored in both global studies and nursing. She recorded lectures instead of taking notes and studied for tests through group discussions with her classmates. 

She did well in fall semesters, even managing a semester abroad in Israel, working with HIV/AIDS in a research project and teaching English to Sudanese refugees.

But spring semesters – fencing season – were brutal, especially since the Tar Heels play all their fencing matches on the road.

“I’ll have weekends – four to six weekends in a row – where I’ll leave at 6 a.m. on Friday morning, but I don’t get back till 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. Monday morning,” she said of the January through March competition schedule. “It’s just a huge time commitment.”

Global studies was a more manageable major, she said, because it’s easy to write a paper on a bus or in a hotel room. But nursing presented problems. “It’s really hard to be in a hotel room practicing a skill you’re going to be evaluated on, like giving shots,” she said.

When the season ended for her team, Litynski was still hard at work training for and participating in conference and national competitions. At Carolina, she racked up honors as perhaps the best woman saber in the history of the team. In addition to the ACC title, Litynski qualified for the NCAA championship four times and was named an All American three years in a row for finishing in the top 12. She was also named 2015 ACC Fencer of the Year in women’s saber.

But after the rush of competition, “you look at all of your grades and you are not happy with them,” she said. She took the hit and recovered later. “If you’re not fencing all the time, you’re recovering. That’s the honest truth of being a student-athlete.”

The entire women’s fencing team has a stellar record in balancing athletics and academics. For the past 10 years, women’s fencing ranked in the top 10 percent nationally based on the NCAA’s academic progress rates. Litynski also qualified for the All-ACC Academic team and was one of four Tar Heels to receive a Weaver-James-Corrigan scholarship for student-athletes pursuing a graduate degree.

As a Hillman Scholar, she is on a path to a doctorate in nursing. She will spend the next three to four years pursuing her research interests in the health care work force, looking at how accessible health care workers are in various parts of the world as well as health inequalities between the rich and poor.

But her fencing days aren’t over yet. When she returns to Carolina this fall, she will be an assistant to longtime Carolina fencing head coach Ron Miller.

She is excited that women’s saber finally became an Olympic sport – it was the last blade to do so, in 2004 – but she won’t be pursuing Olympic dreams in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. 

“I’m not quite at the level where I could just walk onto the team now, and if I wanted to get to that level, I would have to stop everything else that I’m doing and move to a fencing hub,” she said. “I’m not willing to do that amount of sacrifice.”

That’s one hit she won’t have to take.

See also: Big goals, no limits for athletes in the Nursing School