Marshal Davis has been Head Coach since March 2007 when he came to Swarthmore to start a competitive team.  Under his leadership, the team has expanded exponentially in participation, has a full competitive schedule, and has been officially recognized by the Swarthmore College Athletics Department.  Since 2005, Marshal has served as Chief General Legal Counsel of the USACFC, which hosts the largest collegiate fencing event in the world each year.  For the USACFC, he also will serve on the Spirit Award Committee and will be both the SAC and NIWFA representative on the national Seeding Committee.  He was a co-founder of the Southern Atlantic Conference ("SAC"), and has been the Co-Commissioner of the Conference since its inception in 2005.  He is a USFA-rated referee and has refereed NCAA events, along with USFA North American Cup events (Division I, II, and III events) and USFA Summer National Championships.

He works full time as an attorney at law for the full-service law firm Curtin & Heefner LLP.  C&H has offices in Pennsylvania in Morrisville and Doylestown, and an office in Lawrenceville, NJ.  Marshal specializes in business and tax law.  Prior to joining C&H, Marshal was a senior tax attorney with Ernst & Young LLP in Center City Philadelphia.  He is licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  He is currently earning his Master of Laws (LL.M.) in Taxation and his Estate Planning Certificate at Temple University's Beasley School of Law.  In 2005 he earned is Juris Doctor (J.D.) and his Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) from Temple University.  In 2002, Marshal under his Bachelor of Science Degree in Accounting with Honors, with minors in Economics and Geography, from the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he also successfully completed the Honors Program.  In Summer 1997, he completed the FOCUS Program at Brown University in Providence, RI.  He grew up in Jamison, PA and graduated from Central Bucks High School East.  He currently lives with his wife Helen, two rescued tuxedo cats (Charlie & Tux), and their Pomeranian Penny in Buckingham Township, Pennsylvania.

Marshal walked onto the University of Florida Gators Fencing Team in his sophomore year in 1999.  At Florida, he was coached by Bruce Capin, who was trained by Emmanuil Kaidanov at Penn State.  By his senior year, Marshal earned sabre squad Captain and led the team to dual meet victories against club and varsity teams.  His sabre squad won the SWIFA Championships at the University of Texas-Austin in 2002, the same year he was the individual USFA Florida Gateway Division Champion.  When he went to law school at Temple, he started its competitive men's team, which had been absent since the 1980's.  After merely five months, as head coach and fencer, he led the Owls sabre squad to a victory against the Gators in Gainesville in Spring 2004.  The next Spring (2005), he won the inaugural SAC Championship at the University of Maryland - individual champion gold medalist and sabre squad team champions as a player/coach.  He brought Temple to its first USACFC National Championships at UNH that year.  Marshal gained some notoriety the next year at USACFC Champs at Michigan State when he tore his ACL, yet continued to fence the rest of the day, even defeating a fencer in the "A" slot while hopping one one foot.  The next year, recovering from ACL surgery, he coached Temple to an individual championship gold medal in women's sabre and a women's sabre squad silver medal at the SAC Championships.  It was at Temple that Marshal was first invited to participate as one of the only two East Coast Teams to participate in the West Coast Collegiate Invitational Fencing Conference, which Swarthmore participates in now with Florida as the only East Coast representatives.  In his first year at Swarthmore, the team's best performances were at the SAC, where women's epee squad won silver, men's foil squad won bronze, and we had individual medalists in epee and foil, and two in sabre; and at USACFC National Championships, where 5 of 6 squads made the direct elimination round, and Doug Woos made the individual foil final.  Marshal helped Swarthmore secure hosting the 2009 SAC Championships and 2010 USACFC National Championships in the team's first year of existence as an Athetics Department recognized sport.
Other fencing and coaching results are available upon request.

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