Two years ago, Northwestern fencing team webmaster Ravi Gogte announced that the women’s fencing team could no longer be featured on the fencing team Web site.

While the NU women’s fencing team was varsity, the men’s team was a club squad. And the NU administration didn’t want a varsity team relegated to a mere club Web site.

Gogte was playing a practical joke on his teammates, as it turned out. But as a result of the incident, there was an outpouring of support on the Web-site guestbook for the the men’s team’s inferior status.

Fencers, their friends and their families wrote impassioned letters about the unity between the two teams.

After all, the men and women travel and compete together. The men provide stiff competition for the women during practices. And both teams sell hot dogs at football games and clean up the stadium afterwards in order to pay for their gear.

The main difference between the two teams is that the men were demoted to club status in 1994. Before that, they had been one of NU’s stronger teams, even notching the university’s only varsity national championship ever, a 1941 title.

A year after losing varsity status, the men’s club fencers were allowed to compete in NCAA qualifying matches. Four NU fencers who would have qualified for the 1995 national meet weren’t allowed to go because their team was not varsity.

Now, the men don’t even get to compete in the qualifiers. If they did, says NU assistant coach Ed Kaihatsu, at least two current men’s fencers would have a shot at finishing in the top four or five regionally for their weapon, sending them to NCAAs.

Kaihatsu says senior Aren Adjoian is one of the best sabreists in the Midwest, and freshman Rob Bralow is one of the top-10 junior ep