NEW STRENGTH AT THE TOP
Heartened by its first dual-meet victory over arch-rival Harvard in a dozen years, the return of all but one member of last year's starting nine and the imminent arrival of their strongest softball recruit in school history, the storied Yale squash program is excitedly anticipating the 2002-2003 intercollegiate season, the 20th in which head coach Dave Talbott will be at the Eli helm. Yale has added USA junior superstar Julian Illingworth and Israeli standout Avner Geva to a balanced lineup that only graduated one of the top nine. As a consequence, Yale will certainly challenge for the Ivy League Crown.

The Ivy League race last year was one of the most competitive in its history, with champion Princeton relying on a pair of airtight 5-4 wins over both Yale and Harvard in meets that were replete with five-game matches, and the closeness between the Big Three, all of which lost very few players to graduation, is also reflected by the Potter Cup postseason nine-man team competition, in which Princeton again defeated Yale 5-4 in the semi-finals before losing to three-time defending champion Trinity in the ensuing final and Harvard avenged their four-day-old loss to Yale.

EXCITING UPCOMING CAMPAIGN
The forthcoming campaign figures to be equally hard fought, as the strength and depth in the top four teams will arguably be greater than at any time in American intercollegiate squash history. That will certainly be true of the Yale varsity, the departure of whose only senior, captain Peter Grote, will be more than counter-balanced by the addition of two talented freshmen, namely Israeli Avner Geva, who may contend for a spot in the top three, and superstar Julian Illingworth of Oregon, the best player to come to Yale at least since the adoption of the ball-change to softball eight years ago.

Illingworth is already thoroughly familiar with the Payne Whitney Gymnasium's 15-court Brady Squash Center, where he won the USSRA 19-and-under Nationals and placed eighth in the S. L. Green championships, both of which were hosted by Yale in a three-week span last winter. With Trinity, Princeton and Harvard all acquiring highly gifted freshmen of their own in Swiss Yvain Badan, Egyptian Yasser El-Halaby and Greenwich's Will Broadbent (Illingworth's co-finalist in the Under-19's) respectively, it is crucial for Yale to finally have a player of Illingworth's caliber at the No. 1 position, where the depth-rich but superstar-less Eli program has struggled ever since the softball era began in the mid-1990's.

Illingworth should definitely change that situation, as he proved just last month in advancing to the final of the U. S. Professional championships (in which he competed as an amateur) in Los Angeles, where he advanced all the way to the final on the strength of two routine wins over Richard Elliott and Mark Lewis and a rousing come-from-behind semi-final victory over the heavily-favored Egyptian Kerim Yehia, who had three match-points in the fourth game before Illingworth prevailed 15-12 in the fifth.

THREE PART TEAM
Yale's varsity, like the Gaul of Julius Caesar's famous memoirs, can be divided into three parts. The top three will feature Illingworth, Geva and last season's No. 1 Anschul Manchanda, the junior from India whose prepossessing talent has increasingly been complemented by a mental toughness level that improved markedly during the course of last year's schedule, at the end of which he defeated Princeton's senior captain Peter Kelly in the Pool individual championships. The latter also has the pedigree to eventually attain greatness; his father, Brigadier Manchanda, won the India National Championship for eight straight years and is presently a highly respected coach in the India Squash Federation.

The younger Manchanda and Geva will probably compete for the Nos. 2 and 3 positions behind Illingworth, who will be the first Yalie to start his freshman year at No. 1 in the 15 years since John Musto began his Yale career in autumn of 1987. Backing this trio at the top of the line-up will be a quintet of solid and almost interchangeable players who likely will duplicate the phenomenon that gave Yale the most depth of any Ivy League team last season and in fact enabled the Elis to sweep the Nos. 6-9 positions in both battles against Princeton, only to lose when Princeton's top five, deemed the best in school history by its 20-year head coach Bob Callahan, went a combined 10-0 in this pair of regular-season and Potter Trophy meets.

Sophomore Josh Schwartz, who played as high as No. 2 during his freshman campaign, leads a group that includes junior Ryan Byrnes, seniors Chris Olsen of Cincinnati and Manchanda's compatriot Aftab Mathur and sophomore Gavin Cumberbatch of Barbados.

Likely to join this group as well this year will be junior Albert McCrery, whose only loss at No. 8 last season was to a Trinity juggernaut that dropped only two of their 144 matches en route to compiling a 16-0 record and winning their fifth straight NISRA regular-season title. The welcome presence of Illingworth and Geva should enable all of these players in the second tier to play either at or even slightly below the positions they held last season, and the year of additional experience should stand each of them in good stead.

BOMB SQUAD
Just behind them should be senior and team captain Ziad Haider, a native Pakistani, sophomore Chris Wyant, whose older brothers Jack and Tim were stars at Princeton and Harvard respectively, and junior Alex Ende, who will be joined a well by a trio of freshmen composed of Trevor Rees, Andrew Vinci and Alex Tilton.

Last year the talent was so even in the last several spots on the varsity and the challenge matches for those precious few positions so intense that Coach Talbott has taken to affectionately dubbing this crew the "Bomb Squad." One of its members, the aforementioned Wyant, exemplified this group's grit in a match at No. 9 in the dual-meet against Princeton on enemy turf at Jadwin Gymnasium, when his seemingly insurmountable 2-0, 8-0 lead eventually dissolved into an 8-4 fifth-game deficit, from which he still bootstrapped his way to victory, 10-9 in the fifth, in a match in which, incredibly, both he and his Princeton opponent Nate Beck BOTH had more than 10 match points!

ASSESSING THEIR CHANCES
The real question is whether the dominance Yale should continue to enjoy in the bottom half of the line-up against their Ivy League rivals will be accompanied by better results and at least an occasional breakthrough up top. Every member of defending Ivy League champion Princeton's formidable 2001-2002 top five will be returning for his senior year this season save captain Kelly, and his departure will more than be made up for by the arrival of the immensely gifted El-Halaby, arguably the best Tiger recruit ever, who is currently already ranked in the top 70 of the PSA world professional standings and is fully expected to strongly challenge Trinity's Individual Intercollegiate champion Bernardo Samper in his attempted defense of this title.

Princeton's Nos. 6-9 players are all returning as well, as are all but one (co-captain Lefika Ragontse) of the top-five players in the Trinity contingent that rode roughshod over everyone last season and have now won 78 consecutive team matches since losing the Potter Trophy final to Harvard in March 1998.

Harvard will lose Pete Karlen, David Barry and Tomo Hamakama to graduation, but Broadbent should give the program a big boost near the top and James Bullock, Ziggy Whitman, Dylan Patterson and Michael Blumberg all came up big in the 8-1 Harvard win over Yale in the 3rd/4th Potter Trophy play-off meet that occurred four days after Yale's 6-3 dual-meet triumph in New Haven.

Both the strength of the Yale team and the strength of its primary opponents will therefore be at an all-time high. The 2002-2003 Ivy League championship, which in each of the past three years has been resolved by 5-4 Harvard-Princeton outcomes that went both ways, will be very much up for grabs and both the challenge and the opportunity for Talbott's troops will be greater than at any time since the softball era of college squash began nearly a decade ago.