Undefeated during the past four years and winners of five NISRA team championships and four post-season Art Potter Trophies in a row, the Trinity Bantams under head coach Paul Assaiante have a promising crop of seven strong incoming freshmen to replace the five seniors. The new freshmen will include bright young stars from Switzerland and India, complemented by mid-range players drawn from US Junior ranks.

DEPARTING FIVE
The five departing seniors (Lefika Ragontse, Rohan Bhappu, Noah Wimmer and the Juneja twins, Rohan and Gaurav) were central to Trinity's 66-0 record during that extended period of time (78-0 counting the three Potter Trophy victories per year which they added every March) . The record also shows that all five graduated on schedule with solid academic achievements and have landed either with appointments to assistant pro positions at well-known clubs or, in the cases of Bhappu and Rohan Juneja, as investment banking trainees with prestigious companies in New York and Boston respectively.

RETURNING CORE
They leave behind a powerful crew of returning lettermen that includes five of last season's top six and is led by Bernardo Samper, who as a freshman went undefeated all year at No. 1 and capped off this spectacular rookie season by winning the 2002 Pool Trophy as Intercollegiate Individual champion. Michael Ferreira, the Englishman who went undefeated at No. 1 two years ago before being displaced from that slot by Samper last season, was a semi-finalist in the 2002 Pool tourney to finish off a season during which he went undefeated at No. 2 on a team that won all but two of their 144 individual matches during their 16-meet schedule. He and Samper were joined by teammates Nickolas Kyme and Bhappu as four of the eight Pool quarter-finalists. Kyme played behind Ragontse, who as a junior lost to Princeton's David Yik in the 2001 Pool final, with the solidly-built Jonathan Smith and lanky South African Nadeem Osman backing Kyme up at the Nos. 5 and 6 spots respectively. Osman's compatriot Reggie Schonborn, who played No. 9 as a second-semester freshman after enrolling at Trinity in late-January, also returns from last season, as do junior Pat Molloy and senior Carl Baglio.

NEW BRIGHT LIGHTS
These eight holdovers from the 2001-2002 championship squad will be joined this coming fall by a strong septet of high-school stars, the most prominent of which appears to be Yvain Badan, the top-ranked junior player in Switzerland, who might even challenge for a spot in the top three of the formidable Bantam varsity.

Junaid Nathani of India is also highly respected for his results in junior competition and should be a candidate to make the starting nine as well.

There are also five American prep-schoolers who are products of the expanding U. S. Junior program and who have achieved distinction at the prep-school and junior tournament levels. They are Eric Wadhwa, who grew up in Poughkeepsie, played at Taft and was coached by Westchester's Richard Millman; Coly Smith of Locust Valley, the #1 player at Hotchkiss; Nick Raho from Rye Country Day School, who learned the game from Peter Briggs; and Tripp Kyle and Jay Boothby who were teammates this past season at Chestnut Hill in suburban Philadelphia.

Both these recruits and the returning lettermen face a strong challenge in 2002 from the top Ivy League schools, all of which have upgraded their programs in a quest to wrest away the championships that Trinity has consistently been winning in recent years. Last month saw Samper successfully defend the Colombia national championship he had won in 2001, and Kyme and Schonborn both won pro events in Guyana and South Africa respectively as well.

After losing a group of unique skill and character to graduation and reloading with what will clearly be a strong and deep freshman class, Coach Assaiante now has the important task of getting these recruits both to realize their impressive potential and, perhaps more importantly, to integrate themselves into the team concept that has served Assaiante's coaching style so well over the years and enabled him and his charges to compile a record that is fast approaching dynastic proportions. Whether he and they can sucessfully meet this daunting dual challenge will comprise much of the story line as the 2002-2003 college season unfolds.