Photography courtesy University of Notre Dame Athletics
Luke Linder was just tagging along on his sister’s official fencing visit to Notre Dame during the summer after his freshman year of high school. Kara Linder ’22 wanted to find the right place to continue her impressive high school fencing career.
Lucky for the Irish, her little brother came home from that summer tour also hoping to leave a legacy at the University.
“I remember telling her, ‘Don’t screw this up.’ I think I wanna come here one day, too,” Luke Linder ’24 says.
In keeping with NCAA recruiting standards, the Irish coaching staff waited until his junior year of high school to reach out. Though other schools were on his list, it didn’t take him long to choose Notre Dame.
That decision would lead him to become the most decorated male fencer in program history. On March 24, Linder won his third NCAA sabre title in four years, making him the sole Notre Dame men’s fencer with three individual national championships (2021, 2023, 2024).
An elementary school assembly in his hometown of Chandler, Arizona, sparked his interest in the sport. The fencing demonstration fascinated Linder, then age 7.
“I remember sitting there on the ground and looking over at my Mom just saying: ‘Wow!’ I had never seen anything like this before,” he says.
He grabbed a flier promoting the fencing club and begged his mother to let him start lessons. Unfortunately, the after-school fencing program had an age requirement of 8. “For a whole year, I kept this dream in my head,” he recalls.
The following year, his parents signed him up. It didn’t take long for his talent to attract attention. At age 9, he was seeded first in the country for the under-10 category and placed second in the national championship. He found success in older age groups, too.
Meanwhile, Kara also excelled, earning her first World Cup win at age 14.
The Linders traveled to national tournaments and competed internationally, too. In the western United States, competitive fencing isn’t typically a school-sponsored sport. Linder compares his participation in youth fencing to more commonly known travel sports like soccer or baseball.
At Notre Dame, he has helped lead the Irish to three back-to-back national championships, the most dominant performance by any NCAA program in 25 years. The team this year narrowly missed a fourth title, downed by Harvard 169-161.
Though a team silver felt like a defeat, Linder’s individual performance made him the first NCAA’s men’s sabre fencer since 2006 with three individual national crowns. Together with the team’s three titles, that’s six for Linder, if you’re counting.
“If you can stay dedicated, and every day you’re actively seeking to get better — our coaches are some of the best in the world,” he says. “We have great teammates, some of the best in the country — it’s a great mix all around.”
Linder, who holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, has a chance now to continue his historic run. He’ll return for 2024-25 as an engineering graduate student in his fifth year of athletic eligibility.
In late February, Jadin O’Brien ’24 showed up to the ACC Indoor Track & Field Championships in Boston with almost no physical preparation.
Lingering injuries during the previous year — including but not limited to a broken left shinbone, a torn elbow ligament, sprained hands and a strained hamstring — had prevented the 2023 NCAA champion in pentathlon from competing in the 2023-24 indoor season. She spent most of the fall and winter rehabilitating.
In the meantime, O’Brien did what she could: She imagined her victories.
“Training was basically nothing at this point. It’s all pure visualization every night. I would just see myself performing the events because I couldn’t do them physically,” O’Brien says.
The events O’Brien imagined include the 60-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, long jump and the 800-meter run — the five events that comprise the pentathlon, all done in one day. Athletes are scored using a point system and have 30 minutes to recover between events.
The conference championships would be O’Brien’s last opportunity to qualify for the NCAA indoor national championships in March.
Typically, she would have had several meets to fine-tune her approach before the ACC competition. Yet it wasn’t until early February at Notre Dame’s Meyo Invitational that O’Brien finally competed in her first indoor pentathlon since winning her national title the previous spring.
All eyes were on her.
“I was nervous. . . . People are thinking, what can she do?” she says. “And I’m also thinking, what can I do?”
After the first three events, O’Brien was on her way to setting a new personal and school record and securing her spot at nationals. But during the fourth event — the long jump — she felt a painful pop in her hamstring as she leapt from the runway.
She left the meet with a nearly torn hamstring and was unable to finish — another setback to an already frustrating season. The ACC championships, then, would be her final chance to defend her national title. She had three weeks to get healthy.
“By week two, I was able to kind of run slightly faster than a jog. . . . I still couldn’t high jump or hurdle. I could do a couple of shot put drills, but nothing else really,” she recalls. “Week three, my hamstring still hurt and was stiff, but I was able to run faster.”
The day before the team left for the ACC meet, O’Brien sprinted for the first time. “It held up,” she says. “We really cut it down to the wire.”
While her hamstring didn’t feel great, O’Brien clinched an ACC gold — and her nationals qualifying score. She could breathe a sigh of relief, but not for long. She had two weeks to prepare.
Throughout her recovery, O’Brien had immersed herself in a supportive ecosystem. In addition to meeting with her sports psychiatrist and talking to her mother on the phone, she asked five close friends to send her texts every morning leading up to her final collegiate competitions.
“It would be like, ‘Good morning Jadin, you’re doing everything you can, you’re gonna be OK.’ Or, ‘We’re so proud of how far you’ve come.’ Because I was fighting interior demons, my friends gave me affirmation from the outside that I began to believe,” O’Brien says.
The positive wishes paid off. At nationals, she was in third place before the last event — the 800-meter run — and she knew she had to pull out her best.
“We’re gonna do this,” she told herself. “This is the job I have to do. Let’s get after it.”
O’Brien achieved her second national championship that day, becoming the first woman to repeat as the NCAA indoor pentathlon champion since 2016-17. Her score of 4,497 earned her a facility record at the Track at New Balance in Boston.
The Pewaukee, Wisconsin, native has come a long way since finishing fourth in the event as a Notre Dame freshman. A talented soccer and basketball player, she once aspired to play Division I basketball. But after she won state in the 300-meter hurdles during her freshman year at Divine Savior Holy Angels High School, she saw her future in track and field.
The combination of faith and academic excellence attracted her to Notre Dame during the recruiting process.
“Best decision I’ve ever made,” says O’Brien, who graduated with an American studies major and minors in digital marketing and theology.
On April 20, during her first outdoor meet, the pentathlete set new personal and school records with 6,115 points and qualified for the Olympic trials in June. The top three finishers in the trials, scheduled after the magazine went to press, will advance to the Paris games this summer.
In May, O’Brien posted a personal record in the 100-meter hurdles and season bests in the long jump and shot put at the ACC Outdoor Championships in Atlanta.
She’s reaching new heights, with the aim of making the Olympic team. “It’s been my goal since I was 7,” she says, “and I believe I have the skill to do it.”
Allie Griffith is an assistant program director in the Notre Dame Institute for Ethics and the Common Good and a former alumni editor of this magazine.