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Samper Defeats Evans To Win 2002 Pool Trophy


March 4, 2002 © 2002 Rob Dinerman, photos: Samper by Ron Beck, Helal by Debra Tessier, others by Vaughn Winchell — all © 2002. May not be reproduced online or in print without permission.

Trinity Completes Dream Season

Trinity freshman sensation Bernardo Samper defeated Princeton junior Will Evans 4-9, 9-4, 9-5, 9-4 in the final of the 2002 NISRA Individual championships to win the coveted Pool Trophy, named in honor of Harvard star Beekman H. Pool, the winner of the inaugural Intercollegiate championship 70 years ago.

COLUMBIAN SHARP SHOOTER
The precocious Colombian native thereby completed an undefeated 2001-2002 campaign at No. 1 and became part of an historic day for Trinity squash.

Prior to this season-ending competition at Princeton's Jadwin Gymnasium in central New Jersey, the Bantam program, for all its recent greatness, had produced only one Individual champion. Marcus Cowie, the first Trinity superstar around whom head coach Paul Assaiante constructed the present-day dynasty that now has won the last five NISRA regular-season titles and the last four Potter Trophy Nine-Man Team crowns, accomplished the feat as a freshman in '97 and then successfully defended his crown one year later.

Amina Helal - Women's 2002 Champion

HELAL STARTS TRINITY'S DAY
Yesterday's Samper win, however, was preceded by the women's final, in which top-seeded Trinity sophomore Amina Helal, daughter of a former top Egyptian player (Moussa by name) and a losing finalist at Tigress Julie Beaver's hands last season, crushed her freshman teammate, second-seeded Malaysian native Lynn Leung, 9-2, 1 and 0.

The Trinity program thus had more Individual champions in one balmy early-March weekend than in its entire previous decades-long history. It was also the first time that three representatives of a single program had played in the finals of the two Intercollegiate Singles championships, a fitting culmination for a dream season for Coaches Paul Assaiante and Wendy Bartlett, whose teams went a combined 29-0 and completed dominated the intercollegiate picture from wire to wire.

Assaiante, who feels this was the best team he hs ever coached, credits the five seniors, co-captains Lefika Ragontse and Rohan Bhappu, the Juneja twins, Rohan and Gaurav, and Noah Wimmer for providing the leadership that enabled this quintet to go through their four-year college careers, 78 team matches in all counting the Potter postseason tourneys, without a single defeat. One achievement that had eluded the Trinity class of '02 prior to this weekend was the honor of having the Pool competition go to a Bantam banner-bearer.

PETER YIK ON HAND
Peter Yik of Princeton had won this event both in '99 and 2000 (beating Cowie in a memorable final) and his younger brother David had defeated Ragontse in last year's final. Although the younger Yik had lost his semi-final battle with Samper Saturday evening, the presence of the lanky Evans in this year's final therefore gave the host school an opportunity to keep this permanent trophy in Jadwin for the fourth straight year, and he began the early-afternoon summit hot as a pistol, hitting rails and drop shots that were so tight along the left wall that Samper eventually coughed up loose balls that the third seed blasted down the open side for winners.

Will Evans, hailing from Hong Kong and New Zealand, put up a mighty battle.

EVANS CHARGES OUT
Samper's early-match difficulties were compounded by a tactical oversight as well. When play began, Evans was either aggressively going short or, when there was no opportunity for him to force the play, he was hitting high drives that Samper was following to the back wall. Because the court was extremely active, there was no immediate risk in this reaction, but by failing to volley he was granting Evans several valuable seconds of recovery time, which the latter badly needed in the wake of the two long and grueling matches he had played the previous day against Samper's teammates Nick Kyme (who had pushed Evans to five games after losing the first two) and Michael Ferreira, the second seed, whose rescue of the third game from 8-2 down in their Saturday evening semi had caused Evans to expend even more energy.

SAMPER REBOUNDS
The consequences of this necessity came hurtling down upon the game New Zealander once Samper's teammates and coach in a between-games discussion had impressed upon him the importance of cutting more balls off and of thereby taking advantage of the the attritional gains that Kyme and Ferreira, even in defeat, had positioned him to reap. Suddenly Samper was volleying everything in sight, the dynamism in his hands abetting the time pressure he was putting on Evans, who hung in admirably but gradually bent under the battering Samper was administering.

As Tiger head coach Bob Callahan noted in a gracious post-match speech during the trophy presentation, Evans had been pointing specifically for this tournament ever since losing a disappointing five-gamer to Ragontse in the quarters of the 2001 Pool event, and the character he displayed in his pre-final wins over Kyme and Ferreira made a lasting impact on Assaiante as well, whose trio of talented charges had essentially had to gang up on Evans in order to finally defeat him.

Even at that, Evans resisted right to the end, angrily slamming a wall after Samper's mid-match offensive onslaught had brought him to 9-4, 9-5 and a two games to one lead. The explosiveness of Bernardo's attack and the weaponry in his arsenal are reminiscent of the way Michael Desaulniers blitzed the intercollegiate field in '77 in Annapolis, when he became the first of only four players (Kenton Jernigan in '83, Adrian Ezra in '91 and, as noted, Cowie five years ago being the others) to capture the Pool Trophy during their freshman seasons.

Bernardo Samper from Bogota, Columbia- 2002 Champion as a Trinity Freshman

Now Samper could join that elite group if he could win one more game against his gritty but exhausted opponent. Samper did get there, but not without first weathering an eleventh-hour comeback effort from Evans, who fell behind 8-1 in the fourth. Spurred on by an overflow pro-Princeton crowd, Evans managed one last rally to 4-8,but the deficit, both on the scoreboard and in his energy supply, was too great to overcome. Samper had proven himself to be the best player in the college game throughout the 2001-2002 season and it was therefore only fitting that he win the Pool Championship.

None of his four predecessors as freshman Pool champions was able to win this tournament all four of their intercollegiate seasons, though Desaulniers, Jernigan and Ezra each wound up as three-time champions, as did their female counterparts Wendy Zaharko in the early 1970's, Alicial McConnell in the early 1980's, Demer Holleran in the late 1980's and more recently the aforementioned Beaver, all (save McConnell) from Princeton, whose current women's head squash coach Gail Ramsay became in 1977-80 the only player, male or female, to win four Intercollegiate crowns.

Whether Samper can duplicate this formidable task remains to be seen, but he certainly proved all season and all weekend that he has the athleticism and skill to challenge this record and lead the Trinity program to build on the dream season it just concluded and to dominate the college ranks for several seasons to come.

LEONG VS HELAL ON SHOW

[Men's Draw]             [Women's Draw]

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