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Samper to face Countryman in Pool Quarters Today


March 2, 2002 © 2002 Rob Dinerman, photos: © 2002 Debra Tessier. May not be reproduced online or in print without permission.

Three teammates join Samper in quarters today

Top-seeded Trinity freshman Bernardo Samper and three of his Bantam teammates reached the quarter-final round of the NISRA season-ending Pool Trophy tourney to determine the Individual Intercollegiate champion.

Both the quarters and the semis will be played today, with the final scheduled for early tomorrow afternoon at Jadwin Gymnasium, the home of the Ivy League champion Princeton Tigers, who finished second to Trinity in both the regular season NISRA competition and the Art Potter nine-man team tournament, which took place last weekend on Harvard's Murr Center courts.

Trinity's dual-meet championship was their fifth in a row, and their pair of 8-1 triumphs over Harvard and Princeton in the semi-final and final rounds in Cambridge gave head coach Paul Assaiante and his talented crew their fourth consecutive Potter Trophy. The best of the five Bantam seniors who thus closed out their intercollegiate careers with a perfect 66-0 team match slate was co-captain Lefika Ragontse, a finalist in last year's Pool event, when he lost in four well-played games to Princeton's David Yik.

RAGONTSE
Ragontse played his best squash of the season in late December, when he rallied from a two games to one deficit and from way behind in the fourth to defeat Harvard captain Pete Karlen and thereby capture the University Club of New York College Invitational for the second straight time. Karlen subsequently suffered first a severe foot injury and then a burst blood vessel in his eye, which have sidelined him for the crucial final stretch of the season, and Ragontse, ravaged by the flu, lost in his first round to Yale's Peter Grote, a disappointing ending to a wonderful college career for the gifted Botswana native, who will be an assistant pro at the Baltimore Country Club next season.

Grote then was eliminated in straight games by Harvard star James Bullock, who in today's only Bantam-free quarter will face defending champion Yik (a second-round winner over Win Tangjaitrong of Williams), whom Bullock shocked in straight games in the Harvard-Princeton dual meet in Cambridge last month.

YIK
Yik will definitely be looking both to extend his title defense and to get his revenge on the precocious Jamaican, who this time will have to duplicate his earlier win over the 2001 Pool titlist on the latter's home turf. The winner of that match will have to face a Colombian in the semi this evening, since both Samper, who was undefeated throughout the 2001-2002 campaign, and his opponent, Javier Castilla of Dennison, are natives of that South American country.

SAMPER
Samper defeated Crimson star Michael Blumberg and Castilla topped the host school's Danny Rutherford in a pair of top-half quarters between Colombians and Canadians. The third quarter-final will feature Trinity's Nickolas Kyme against Princeton No. 1 Will Evans, whose teammate Eric Pearson, the hero of the 5-4 early-February victory by the Tigers over Yale, was completely whitewashed, 27 points to zero, by Kyme. Pearson appeared disinterested in his match yesterday, and later defaulted from his consolation match pairing.

This was a welcome Jadwin reversal for the Bermuda native, who two weeks earlier had suffered Trinity's only defeat in their 8-1 NISRA title-clinching win at this same central New Jersey location at the hands of Tiger captain Peter Kelly, the only senior in the team's otherwise all-junior top five, which their head coach Bob Callahan has termed the best to school history. Kyme followed his Pearson match with a 3-1 win over Penn freshman Richard Repetto, while Evans's straight-set opponent in the round-of 16 was Yale's No. 1 Anschul Manchanda.

FERREIRA v BHAPPU
The bottom quarter will be an all-Trinity affair, with their No. 2 Michael Ferreira going against Rohan Bhappu. The second-seeded British-born Ferreira advanced in four over Kelly, but it was the senior Bhappu (whose classmates include Rohan and Gaurav Juneja Ragontse and Nick Wimmer) who provided most of the surprises in his first-ever advance to this stage of the Pool draw. He defeated tenth seed Parth Doshi of Williams in five, then completely dominated Dartmouth's sixth-seeded Ryan Donegan in the second round. The quarters will begin at 1 o'clock this afternoon and the semis are scheduled for 7 o'clock this evening.

Squashtalk will provide complete coverage of today's matches, as well as a report on the Sunday final and a college season recap early next week.

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