College 02-23 Weekend Showdown Preview

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[College Results]

Feb 2 2003 - Weekend Showdown Preview
By Rob Dinerman © 2003 SquashTalk Jan 5, 2003 © 2003

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WOMEN'S CSA AND MEN'S IVY TITLES ON THE LINE
The Murr Center and the Payne Whitney Gymnasium at Harvard and Yale respectively will be the main focus points of the squash world's attention this weekend, and that would likely be true even if there weren't open dates on the ISDA and PSA schedules.

The last two women's national intercollegiate Howe Cup team champions, Harvard two years ago and Trinity last year, will match undefeated records while the Yale men will try to reverse the four consecutive 5-4 decisions that have gone in defending Ivy
League champion Princeton's favor over the past two years.

Does Tiger veteran #5 Eric Pearson again hold the key?

The most important and painful of those one-point outcomes came in last year's thrilling dual meet at Jadwin Gymnasium, an incredibly hectic roller-coaster affair replete with taut battles, including a war between freshman Nate Beck and his Eli opponent Chris Wyant in which, possibly without precedent, each player had more than TEN match-balls! Wyant eventually came away with that match, but Princeton nevertheless prevailed 5-4 when Tiger No. 5 Eric Pearson won the fifth game of the last match of the day from current Yale captain Chris Olsen. It seemed fitting that the No. 5 match, the precise middle of a nine-player line-up, proved decisive and required a fifth game, since that spot has been where the power pendulum has swung in these 5-4 tallies, in all of which Yale has swept (in some cases, as noted, however barely) the Nos. 6-9 slots only to see Princeton similarly sweep the top five positions.

SUPER SENIORS
Much of Princeton's upper-echelon dominance has been due to the strength and depth of the senior class of 2003, deemed the best in school history by Bob Callahan, an all-American there in the mid-1970's and the team's head coach since 1981, whose virtually three decades of near-continual active involvement with the Tiger program leaves him well-qualified to make such a judgment. 2002 Intercollegiate Individual finalist Will Evans, 2001 Champion David Yik, Danny Rutherford and Pearson manned four of the top five slots as juniors last season, along with the now-graduated team captain Peter Kelly, who went undefeated during the 2001-2002 regular season, mostly at No. 4, where his 3-0 win over Trinity's Nick Kyme was Princeton's only breakthrough in the 8-1 loss to Trinity that gave Coach Paul Assaiante's troops their fifth consecutive regular-season title.

The void left by Kelly's departure has been more than filled by Egyptian freshman Yasser el-Halaby, who swiftly established himself as the No. 1 player and whose very convincing victory over reigning Intercollegiate Individual champion Bernardo Samper keyed a surprisingly dominant 4-1 Princeton victory over defending two-time USSRA Five-Man Team champion Trinity in early December that gave the Tigers their second such team title in four years. el-Halaby's presence is a crucial counterpoint to Yale's
freshman sensation Julian Illingworth, also an immediate No. 1, who grabbed the first two games against el-Halaby before eventually losing in five in the Ivy Scrimmages in November, the most recent of this skein of 5-4 results in Princeton's favor.

YALE BANKS ON HOME COURTS
Yale coach Dave Talbott is cautiously confident that if his team's extraordinary depth can once again create a sweep of the last four spots this weekend, the home-court advantage the Elis enjoy this time can lead to the one needed victory in the top five. There is a lot of pressure on those Princeton seniors to win out without being able to afford a single stumble, which they may have to do yet again in order to leave behind what would be a legacy of three Ivy League championships in their four years, which no previous Princeton generation in the men's program's 71-year history has been
able to accomplish. The Ivy League titles in each of the past three years have all gone to whichever team has won the trio of 5-4 matches with Harvard (which went to the Crimson in 2001), but this year the Harvard men do not seem to possess the depth to triumph over either of its Big Three rivals, despite the towering presence atop the Harvard line-up of the 6 foot, 4 inch Will Broadbent, whose freshman status means that for the first time in the history of Ivy League squash, each of the Big Three powers has a freshman at the No. 1 position.

Broadbent, the runner-up to Illingworth in last season's USSRA under-19 championships, demonstrated the expanding breadth of his arsenal when he
overpowered the field at the University Club College Invitational in New York this past December. But his Harvard women's team No. 1 counterpart Louisa Hall trumped even that achievement earlier this month when she won the Harvard Club Invitational, a U. S. Team Selection event featuring all four members of the 2002 American Pan American Federation Cup squad and led in the top two seeding positions by the Khan sisters, Latasha and Shabana, who between them have won each of the last three National Championships and four of the last five.

HARVARD WOMEN LED BY HALL
Notwithstanding their intimidating credentials, both Khan sisters fell to the two-time all-American junior Hall, Shabana in the quarter-final round and Latasha, who served for the match at 8-6, in the final. In between her first-ever career wins over the Khans, and perhaps more relevantly in terms of the Harvard-Yale clash at the end of next month that is expected to determine the 2002 Ivy League women's champion, Hall trounced Yale No. 1 (and yet ANOTHER freshman) Michelle Quibell, who had reached the semi-final stage by beating 2002 Nationals finalist Meredeth Quick. Quibell and her teammates are substantial favorites to defeat their Princeton opponents this weekend, but Hall will have to contend with 2002 Intercollegiate Individual champion Amina Helal, who is fresh off winning the Betty Constable Invitational this past weekend while Hall and her supporting cast were training for this
weekend's confrontation at the University of Toronto.

HELAL AND LEONG A STRONG 1-2 PUNCH

Trinity's No. 2 Lynn Leong was Helal's co-finalist in the Intercollegiates last season, defeating both Hall and Crimson No. 2 Lindsey Wilkins in straight games in the semi- and quarter-final rounds respectively in straight games in the process. After being away from Trinity to study in Germany during the fall semester, Helal has appeared vulnerable in her matches earlier this month, losing to Penn star Runa Reta in the Trinity-Penn dual meet (as Leong also did in the Constable semis) and trailing Quibell two games to one in the Constable semis before winning the last two games of that match and defeating Reta in a hard-fought four-game final.

Helal's pair of victories over Hall last year in both the regular-season meet and Howe Cup final were indispensable factors in Trinity's 5-4 margins on both occasions, but the 2002 Harvard varsity had seniors backing up Hall in the Nos. 2-4 positions (namely Margaret Elias, Hall's older sister Colby, the Crimson captain, and Carlin Wing) and Coach Satinder Bajwa has understandably had difficulty filling the considerable hole near the top of the line-up created by their graduation. By contrast, the Trinity squad lost only two of its top nine from last year and an influx of talented freshmen has left Bantam coach Wendy Bartlett, a champion at last in her 18th season at the Trinity helm, in an enviable position as she prepares her deep and gifted squad for this impending critical stretch of the season.

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