This past weekend No. 4 Northwestern needed a strong performance. After several subpar performances two weeks ago at North American Cup followed by tough losses to No. 3 Notre Dame, No. 6 Ohio State, No. 8 Temple and unranked Columbia a week ago at the Philadelphia Invitational and NYU Invitational, the Wildcats were hungry for positive results this weekend at the Notre Dame Duals.

That hunger was satisfied.

The Wildcats beat every team they faced except for Notre Dame, picking up eight victories. NU got an especially strong performance from a foil squad that defeated every team and only lost five bouts at the event, four of them to Notre Dame.

“They fenced very well. We dominated every other team (except Notre Dame),” coach Laurie Schiller said. “They came out and fenced very, very hard, and that’s what we were looking for.”

While the level of competition the Cats faced at Notre Dame was much lower than that seen in Philadelphia and New York – which featured some of the top-ranked squads in the nation – and contained many club teams, a strong performance this weekend was critical for seeding in the Midwest Conference Championships, which would ultimately help the team in the NCAA Championships in March, Schiller said.

During the weekend, NU compiled many impressive victories against teams like University of Chicago, Florida, and Iowa, which NU beat by a combined score of 77-4. But the best victory may have been NU’s 25-2 win over Wayne State, in which the foil squad swept a team to which they had lost one week earlier in NYU Invitational.

“I would say we did a really good job,” foil squad captain Camille Provencal said. “We were all really supportive and showed what a really good job we could do against good teams.”

Even NU’s 17-10 loss to Notre Dame, the defending national champions, showed an improvement from the Cats’ last dual against the Fighting Irish in New York, where NU lost 19-8.

The event at Notre Dame was different from the traditional dual setup because each team’s foil,