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[College Results]

Harvard Women, Yale Men Create Split Meet
By Rob Dinerman staff © 2003 SquashTalk Feb 20, 2003 © 2003  

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Yale's Julian Illingworth was the difference in their historic win over Harvard in Cambridge (photo © 2003 Debra Tessier)

With the team score knotted at four matches apiece and
the 2003 Ivy League championship resting squarely on the outcome of the No. 1 match, Harvard junior co-captain Louisa Hall came through with a dramatic 8-10 9-0 9-6 10-8 victory over Yale's Michelle Quibell, who had soundly defeated her just four days earlier, to give the Crimson and the joyous fans packing the Murr Courts gallery their third consecutive Ivy League title. In so doing, Hall demonstrated the form that had won her the Harvard Club Of New York Invitational last month, the resiliency to decisively surmount the four defeats she had sustained during a few difficult post-Harvard Club weeks and
the ability to come through at crunch time that had resulted in eight USSRA junior-level championships during the late 1990's.

Quibell had been Hall's final-round victim in several of those USSRA tournaments, as well as in the semis of the Harvard Club event five weeks ago, when Hall had sandwiched a straight-game victory over her between first-ever career triumphs over Shabana Khan in the quarter-finals and (from two-love down) in the final against three-time and current women's National champion Latasha Khan. But this past weekend in the semi-final round of the Howe Cup to determine the CSA team championship, Quibell had responded to dropping a first-game tiebreaker by running off the next three games, 9-1, 4 and 2, to claim her first-ever career win over Hall as part of a surprisingly decisive 8-1 victory for Yale over Harvard, Yale's first in more than a decade in this rivalry.

Stung by both the fact and dimension of this unexpected setback in New Haven, and determined to put forth a much better effort in this significantly more important rematch with a successful defense of their Ivy League crown at stake, Harvard coach Satinder Bajwa's troops culminated a good several days of practices in a victorious performance in a meet in which the areas of strength and weakness in the two respective team line-ups were starkly drawn.

Harvard all-Americans Hall and Lindsey Wilkins took the top two spots. Wilkins had dropped a bitterly fought tiebreaker-in-the-fifth decision in the Howe Cup to Yale freshman Amy Gross this past weekend. In that match she had fallen behind two games to love and been forced to play catch-up throughout the remainder of that contentious 75-minute clash between opponents who have an unpleasant history in the juniors. This time, Wilkins was the one to seize the early advantage in what became a well played and controversy-free match, and she never let up throughout her 9-3, 7 and 4, one of four reversals (Hall, her fellow co-captain Ella Witcher at No. 7 and Alison Fast at No. 8 provided the others) from the Howe Cup.

Out-played at both of the top two slots, Yale showed their middle-of-the-line-up strength by sweeping the Nos. 3-6 positions, winning all 12 combined games in the process, only to then be undone by Harvard's superior depth in the bottom third of the order. Yalies Frances Ho, Rachita Vora, Gina Wilkinson and Sarah Coleman all prevailed over their respective Harvard opponents, many of whom were pushed well up the Crimson ladder when three members of the 2001-2002 top-four graduated last May.

Ironically, depth was supposed to be the forte of Mark Talbott's Eli roster, but sophomore Lauren Doline could muster only a third-set tiebreaker in her four-game
defeat to Witcher, junior Devon Dalzell fell quickly to a revenge-minded Fast and Harvard's Stephanie Hendricks, who had supplied the only Crimson victory in last weekend's loss, was able to again defeat Ruth Kelley at No. 9.

Her quartet of teammates' wins notwithstanding, this team victory and the Ivy League crown it ensured belonged in major measure to Hall. Beset by a lingering case of the flu that invaded her system barely a week after her accomplishments at the Harvard Club, she had her morale further sapped by dual-meet losses to Amina Helal and Runa Reta, the No. 1's for Trinity and Penn respectively, prior to the Howe Cup.

There, as noted, she had lost badly to Quibell in front of the latter's home crowd and one day later had suffered a heart-breaking loss in the third-place play-off when a two games to one lead over Reta metamorphosed, barely, into a 10-8 in the fifth defeat when a couple of drop shots in the tiebreaker found the tin.

Rather than allow this series of setbacks or a squandered game-ball opportunity in the opening game last night to deter or demoralize her, Hall instead responded like a champion by roaring through a 9-0 second game, pressing her advantage in taking the third and ultimately by rallying from 6-8 down to force a tiebreaker conclusion to what had become a murderous fourth game prolonged by many mid-game sequences with no change in the score.

Once in the tiebreaker, Hall failed to convert her first match-ball at 9-8 but seized the second on a forehand working boast from deep in the right part of the court that a diving Quibell failed to retrieve and tossed her racquet skyward in exasperation. In fairness to the freshman Quibell, she played admirably against the consistent pressure of Hall's authoritative depth and had several streaks of shot-making excellence that kept her in the match and brought her to the very brink of forcing what would have been a nerve-racking fifth game.

The men's match-up, won by Yale 5-4, was for second-place in the Ivy League standings, as Princeton had already clinched their second straight Ivy League title and third in the last four years. In a near mirror match of the women's meet that would follow, Harvard swept the Nos. 2-5 positions but yielded the bottom four spots to Yale Nos. 6-9. The Eli men are known for the depth of their roster, as they have already proven the last several times they have opposed Princeton.

In each of the meetings between these rivals over the past several years, including in the match three weeks ago which ultimately determined the 2003 Ivy League champion, Yale has swept the bottom four yet fallen short when Princeton has taken Nos. 1-5.

The most wrenching of these losses for Yale coach Dave Talbott and his troops came in that meeting earlier this month on their home courts when No. 1 Julian Illingworth led his Princeton counterpart Yasser El-Halaby 2-0, 8-4 but failed to cash in that one match-, meet- and championship-point and never got another in his eventual five-game defeat. This time, Illingworth did come through in the final match against Harvard's Will Broadbent to give Coach Talbott his third dual-meet victory in career 20 tries against Harvard and the Yale program its first regular-season "away" win against the Crimson since 1961.

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