NASSAU TIGERS LOOK AHEAD EAGERLY
Winners of two of the last three Ivy League championships, led by a senior class that its veteran head coach Bob Callahan has classified as one of the greatest in the program's seven-decade history and blessed with the impending arrival of arguably its best recruit ever, the Princeton Tigers are eagerly anticipating the 2002-2003 National Intercollegiate Squash Racquets Association (NISRA) season, when the class of 2003 will have a chance to become the first in 21 years to win three Ivy League titles in only four years.

PRINCETON-HARVARD-YALE EQUALITY
The 2002 Ivy League race was decided by the two razor-thin 5-4 victories Princeton was able to attain over first Yale and then Harvard. The self-evident closeness of those two regular-season triumphs combined with the facts that Princeton then beat Yale in the Potter Trophy postseason tournament AGAIN by a 5-4 count and that Yale and Harvard split their two meets with each other all graphically confirm how tightly match these Big Three rivals were last season.

Furthermore, the high return rate all three varsities enjoy combined with the caliber of the top prospects each program was able to land argues for an equally compelling competition throughout the forthcoming campaign. Each of the last three Ivy League titles has ultimately been decided by 5-4 Princeton-Harvard meets, ironically with the winner prevailing on enemy turf on every occasion, a decided rarity in college squash, where the home team usually has a decided advantage in a close contest like all of these have been.

TOP FIVE LOSES ONLY ONE
Princeton's season last year was most defined by the strength of its top five, all juniors in 2001-2002 save captain and No. 4 player Peter Kelly, which went a combined 10-0 against their Yale counterparts in those two airtight battles while the Elis were sweeping the Nos. 6-9 spots both times. In the dual meet on Princeton's home Jadwin Gymnasium turf, 2001 Individual Intercollegiate champion David Yik, who actually played at No. TWO behind New Zealander Will Evans most of the season, Kelly, who had an undefeated dual-meet season, and Evans himself all won fairly convincingly, but at No. 3 Canadian Danny Rutherford dropped the opening game and trailed 7-4 in the second against Yale captain Peter Grote before rallying to take that swing game in a tiebreaker and eventually win in four.

However, the real Tiger heroics that day were provided in the fifth position by Eric Pearson, who had been sidelined with a knee injury until just prior to this early-February meet, and whose consequently suspect conditioning level was put to the ultimate test when Yalie Chris Olsen saved a 5-8 deficit and several match- and meet-points to take that game in a tiebreaker and force a fifth game, the last thing Callahan or a seemingly tiring Pearson wanted. However, Pearson moved out to 4-2, following which there were several close exchanges with no change in the score in the nine-point hand-out scoring system the NISRA employs. It seemed clear that whichever player was able to break the scoreless deadlock would sprint home to victory, and Pearson's ability to dictate most of the all-court action finally took its toll on Olsen, who yielded Pearson's clinching run to 9-2.

It was Pearson's parting shot, as he dropped a three-gamer to Harvard's Michael Blumberg later that month at Harvard's Murr Center, where 500 Crimson loyalists had turned out in hopes of cheering their heroes to a successful defense of the Ivy League title they had won in 2001.

HARVARD MATCHUP
Yik's unexpected and straight-game defeat at the hands of Harvard's James Bullock meant that this time Princeton needed wins from its other three top-five players, Evans, Kelly and Rutherford (all of whom in fact came through) and at least two victories from the nether region of the line-up that had been so stymied against Yale's impressive depth just one week earlier. Freshman Dent Wilkins and sophomore Aaron Zimmerman both fell to their Harvard opponents and Nos. 6 and 7, but at Nos. 8 and 9 Rob Siverd and Nate Beck both came through in clutch comeback performances that belie their freshman status.

Siverd trailed senior Tomo Hamakawa two games to one and 7-5 in the fourth, but he surprised his older foe with an exhibition of daring and accurate shot making that gave him well-deserved 9-7 wins in both that seemingly lost game and the following fifth as well. As for Beck, who just seven days earlier had trailed Yalie Chris Wyant 2-0, 8-0, WON that game and eventually led 8-4 in the fifth, only to wind up losing 10-9 in a match in which, incredibly, BOTH players had more than 10 match points, his ability to surmount his youth, the demoralizing nature of the Wyant defeat and Harvard's Ryan Abraham's 1-1, 8-3 advantage and to salvage that pivotal third game 10-9 and go on to win the final fourth is an absolute testament to his resiliency and fortitude and a deserving justification for the Athlete Of The Week designation the university subsequently awarded him.

Additionally and perhaps more pertinently, Beck's rally gave the Tigers their fourth win of the meet and put the meet on the talented racquet of the gifted Evans, who was leading Dylan Patterson two games to love when Beck's match ended and proceeded to win the Ivy League crown-clinching third game in fairly straightforward fashion. Evans would eventually defeat Trinity stars Nick Kyme and Michael Ferreira to reach the final of the Pool Trophy for the Individual Intercollegiate championship, where he would lose in four to Trinity's freshman sensation Bernardo Samper, whose semi-final opponent, the aforementioned Yik, had advanced to that stage by avenging his dual-meet loss to Bullock in three very satisfying games.

Samper consolidated this championship by winning the national title of his native Colombia last month, but the biggest threat to his defense of the intercollegiate crown ironically may well come from an extremely powerful group of incoming freshmen that includes Yale-bound USSRA National Under-19 champion Julian Illingworth and Swiss star Yvain Badan, who will be adding his considerable skills to the powerhouse Trinity line-up, whose top six from 2001-2002 will be losing only co-captain and 2001 Pool finalist Lefika Ragontse and which has gone undefeated throughout the past four seasons.

Trinity actually got off to a shaky start in the Trinity-Princeton meet for the NISRA championship last February 17th, but the Tigers were unable to sustain their early momentum and fell 8-1 both in that meet and in the final of the Potter Nine-Man team competition several weeks later to finish second overall in the national team rankings. These same two squads had also previously met in December in the final of the USSRA Five-Man Team tourney, a 4-1 win for the Bantams, with Rutherford winning in five after trailing two games to one to Ragontse in the first of what became a pulsating three-part series, with Ragontse eking out a fourth-game tiebreaker in the dual meet and Rutherford taking the rubber match in the Potter Trophy, which as noted was the only Tiger win that afternoon.

TOP RECRUIT FROM CAIRO
As formidable a challenge as Badan and Illingworth figure to pose to Samper's reign, Princeton may well have landed the biggest prize of all in the extremely talented form of Yasser El-Halaby, a native of Cairo, Egypt who is a four-time British Open Junior champion and currently ranked No. 68 on the PSA world pro tour, and whom Coach Callahan, an all-American himself at Princeton in the mid-1970's now entering his 22nd season as head coach, has deemed as "our best recruit ever." His arrival will more than counter-balance Kelly's departure and a Tiger top four composed of himself and tri-captains Evans, Yik and Rutherford will make a powerful quartet indeed.

BOOTHBY AND MONTGOMERY JOIN TIGERS
Pearson and the underclassmen Wilkins, Zimmerman, Siverd and Beck will be joined by junior Will Osnato, who reached the fringes of the varsity last season, and several additional freshmen, the best of whom appear to be New York native Will Boothby, who played No. 1 at Groton last year, and Bob Montgomery, a Virginian who was ranked No. 16 in the USSRA Under-19 standings.

The 2001-2002 campaign was a highly fulfilling one for the Princeton program, beginning on October 20th with a hugely successful celebration of 100 years (70 for the men, 30 for the women) of Princeton squash, which drew 140 Tiger varsity squash alumni/ae, who came from all over the world to participate in an all-day extravaganza that recognized the glorious history of a program that has generated 22 national dual-match championships (nine men, 13 women) and produced a combined 14 individual intercollegiate champions, four of whom, the recently deceased Steve Vehslage (1959-61), Wendy Zaharko (1973-75), Demer Holleran (1986, 1987 and 1989) and Julia Beaver (1999-2001) were three-time winners of this highly prestigious competition.

Fortified by the eight returning lettermen from last year's starting nine, bolstered by El-Halaby's imminent and most welcome arrival, and well along in his recovery from the hip-replacement surgery he underwent on his right leg this past spring, Coach Callahan now faces the dual challenge first of mounting what would be the first successful Tiger defense of an Ivy League men's title since 1982 and then of taking dead aim at the dynasty Coach Paul Assaiante and his Trinity troops have constructed in Hartford and ending the 78-match winning streak they will carry into the forthcoming season.