CARLETON lad, Billy Shepherd, has been chosen for the 2015 England Fencing trip to Challenge Wratislavia, in Wroclaw, Poland.

Christmas came early for Shepherd this year, as on Christmas Eve the email arrived, telling him that he had been chosen for the national team. In the preceding months and years, however, he had been putting in a lot of hard work to make it happen.

Shepherd started at Skipton Fencing Club in 2009 under the guidance of his coach, Jim Lockyer. With Jim’s expert guidance and his own dedication and determination, Shepherd’s fencing has made steady progress from club to regional level, then to national and now to international level.

Shepherd has won the Yorkshire League under-14 boys epee competition for the past three years and in January he won the Yorkshire junior epee competition. He has been chosen to fence for Yorkshire at under-17 level for the past two years.

Individually, he was ranked fourth in the national under-15 boys epee competition and in the British Regions under-17 epee competition in December, Shepherd and his team-mates, Oliver Steed and James Haynes, won every match and brought the trophy back home to Yorkshire.

Billy’s début for England takes place on Friday, March 20 in Wroclaw, in south-western Poland. Challenge Wratislavia is an annual competition which last year hosted 2,386 fencers from 31 countries.