At this stage, you should be guided the recommendations of your son's coach. I have a small club, and it can be difficult when the parents decide without consulting me to buy equipment for their children. They often buy the wrong things or jump the gun and buy full kit when the kids won't need anything for a long time and outgrow it.
Some of my students did enter competitions, but youth novice tournaments in our area are fenced dry and we borrowed equipment for the finals. This allowed the children to experience a tournament without having too much of a burden on them due to parental expectations that any financial outlay was justified.
That said, if your son wants to fence sabre and his instructor can provide instruction and other children to fence with, you need to decide whether you need a practice sabre or an electric one. There isn't much difference between the two, because an electric sabre is basically just an electrified stick--it has a socket in the guard to take a body cord plug, and you can often modify a practice sabre after the fact to make it electric. You should be guided by local practice (i.e., ask the instructor) as to whether you get a two-prong or bayonet connector. You can buy a practice sabre from any supplier listed at
www.usfencing.org (list reached by clicking "Internet Links" and then "
Equipment Vendors"). You will want to buy a shorter blade for a child (size 2 as opposed to size 5). I buy from
Absolute Fencing myself when I'm buying general practice equipment. Their prices are reasonable and they ship quickly. Again, ask your son's coach for advice.
As for college scholarships, there are a few of them around, but you should wait to look into this. The picture changes frequently. Schools drop fencing or change their funding disconcertingly often. They change from a team sport to a club sport, or they have teams only in one gender. If your son stays with the sport, and becomes a national competitor who has national points, you have a shot at getting a full scholarship to the small number of schools that have them, but it's not guaranteed. A list of the colleges which currently have NCAA fencing is at the
NCAA website.
However, if your son loves fencing, and his grades are good, fencing has the potential to get him into schools with selective admission (the Ivies, for instance, have no sports scholarships, but they do have fencing), and if the school wants him badly enough overall, a fencer is also often able to get an academic scholarship, which is how some of the less athletically-weighted schools manage to attract competent fencers.
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