Table Tennis
Shreyas Chandrashekaran, grade 10, and Kaushik Shivakumar, grade 9, took first place in Division I of the 2015 Bay Area Interschools Table Tennis League, organized by the Fremont Table Tennis Academy! Calling themselves Team Harker, the pair ended the regular season of round-robin competition by remaining undefeated and placing first in their division. In the playoffs, Team Harker defeated Warm Springs A with a match score of 5-0 and prevailed in the finals over Stratford Sunnyvale with a match score of 3-2. Team Harker was happy to earn the top spot for a second year in a row. Chandrashekaran won all his singles matches and was named the League MVP. Go Team Harker! 

Fencing
Harker had two swordspeople competing in the U.S. Fencing Summer National Championships, held in July in San Jose. Both fencers are sophomores, both fence foil and both fence for Silicon Valley Fencing Center. Darren Gu, grade 10, finished 166 out of 247 in Y-14 men’s foil and 23 of 32 teams in men’s team foil. Gu fenced in 11 local and regional events last season, with a first place win out of 48 fencers in a Y-14 event in February. He holds a C-2015 rating.

Jerrica Liao competed in a demanding five women’s events over 10 days, earning top 32 points and finishing 17 out of 115 in Cadet (up to age 17) and finishing 29 out of 179 in Y-14. In senior women’s foil team, she finished 12 out of 22 teams; in the tough Division 1-A event, she finished  52 out of 69; and in juniors (up to age 19), she finished 107 out of 145. All events were A3 or A4 rated. Liao fenced in more than a dozen local, regional and national events last season, including a first place finish out of 71 fencers in Dallas. She holds a B-2014 rating and is ranked 23 nationwide in Cadet, having aged out of the Y-14 bracket.

Editor’s note: Although Harker Athletics does not have table tennis or fencing teams, we are proud to note the successes of our students at these highly competitive endeavors!