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[College Results]

As Women Enter Final Stretch, Williams surprises Princeton
By Rob Dinerman © 2003 SquashTalk Feb 3, 2003 © 2003
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-As the women's CSA season enters its final hectic few weeks, several noteworthy themes have emerged, beginning with the strength of the Trinity varsity, whose 8-1 victory against arch-rival Harvard was all the more impressive for coming on enemy turf at Cambridge, especially in view of the bare-margin 5-4 struggles the Lady Bantams had had with Harvard in both the dual meet and Howe Cup final last season.

Trinity No. 1 Amina Helal, the powerful junior who reached the final of the Individual championship two years ago and defeated teammate Lynn Leong to win the event last year, led the way with a 3-1 win over Crimson star Louisa Hall, who was just two weeks removed from a breakthrough march to the championship of the Harvard Club of New York Invitational, a U. S. Team Selection event, where she defeated the Khan sisters Latasha and Shabana, in each case for the first time, as well as Yale No. 1 Michelle Quibell, whom she will face in a few weeks when Harvard and Yale meet to determine the 2003 Ivy League crown.

Helal's toughest competition so far this season has come from Penn's Runa Reta, who toppled her in the Trinity-Penn dual meet and took her to a close four games in the final of the Betty Constable Invitational last month. Reta and her teammates won over Princeton, whose sub-par 2002-2003 season was punctuated by the 5-4 loss they suffered to Williams just this past weekend,
the first time in the history of these programs that Williams has prevailed. The match was played at a neutral site at Yale, whose varsity had pummeled Princeton 9-0 (27 games to zero) just the day before, but neither that distinctively unhelpful backdrop nor the departure just days before of Annie Rein-Weston, Princeton's No. 3 player, who will be studying abroad this semester, can fully account for this unprecedented outcome.

Rather, it was the newfound strength the Williams squad now boasts at the
bottom half of the line-up came to the fore, as witness its sweep of the Nos.
6-9 positions, that combined with the noticeably improved Clare Whipple's
five-game win over Patricia Gadsden at No. 2 to give this signature moment to
first-year coach Zafi Levy, a former Williams all-American himself who
graduated in 2001 and succeeded Dave Johnson this fall when the latter was
promoted to the dean's office after a dozen years at his alma mater's helm.
Whipple routed Gadsden by identical 9-1 scores in the first two games, but
lost her way in the middle portion of the match before coming through with a
much-needed 9-5 win in the fifth.

Her tight victory was supplemented by wins in the "evens" shift by Lexi
Lee over Rebecca Shingleton at No. 6 and Whitney Halligan (in five) over
Princeton's Kasey Degan at No. 8. Anne Warner contributed a win at No. 6 to
Princeton's cause, but the score still stood at 3-1, Williams as the
odd-numbered players took the court. Lizzie Reifenheiser dispatched Helen
Smith 3-0 at No. 9 to put Williams just one victory away and when No. 7 Kate
Neal rallied from a 7-0 first-game deficit to take it in a tiebreaker, her
Tiger opponent Jenny Shingleton was unable to recover and Neal was home free
with the clinching victory.

Canadian star Ruchika Kumar was much too much (9-4,4 and 2) for Williams senior captain Adrienne Ellman to handle at the top spot and Jaye Gregory gave Princeton its final point with a rallying four-game win over Jo Leathers (who led 1-0, 7-5 before fading), but it was too little, too late for the Tigers, who now find themselves in a rebuilding phase after several Howe Cup and Ivy League championships in recent years. Princeton's fortunes took a downward turn when three-time Intercollegiate Individual champion (1999-2001) Julia Beaver and 2002 Nationals finalist Meredeth Quick graduated in May 2001, but head coach Gail Ramsay, now in her ninth season after six years heading the Williams program, is too formidable a teacher and recruiter for the current Tiger slump to continue for long.

Buoyed by this breakthrough victory, Williams now hosts the Little Three Invitational (Williams, Amherst and Wesleyan) this weekend, where they will be heavy favorites, while Harvard journeys south for away matches on consecutive days against Penn and Princeton. Defending Ivy League champion Harvard should handily win both of these meets, though Hall figures to be strongly challenged by both Reta and Kumar. The Howe Cup to determine the national team champion is set for the weekend of February 14-16, with the Harvard-Yale clash to take place in Cambridge on the 19th and the season-ending Individuals tournament to follow at the very end of February.

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