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[College News]

Battles of the USA College Teams in 2003
Trinity wins Two National Titles, Yale Gains Momentum
By Rob Dinerman, SquashTalk staff © 2003 SquashTalk March 20, 2003 © 2003  

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Trinity's imposing lineup prepares to take their sixth college title over Princeton. (photo © 2003 Ron Beck)

The 2002-2003 College Squash Association (CSA) campaign concluded this past weekend at the Ferris Athletic Center on the campus of Trinity College, which seemed an appropriate location in view of the undefeated seasons both the men's and women's teams of the host school enjoyed in their successful defense of the regular-season and end-of-season nine-player team championships each had won in 2001-2002.

The Trinity men's team, coached by Paul Assaiante, have now won the last six CSA dual-meet titles
and the last five post-season Potter Cups in compiling its current 91-match winning streak extending over the past five undefeated seasons, while Wendy Bartlett's troops had never won a national team championship prior to the last two seasons but currently appear to be firmly positioned to dominate the women's college scene for the foreseeable future.

TRINITY WOMEN SWEEP HOWE CUP

Amina Helal led the Lady Bantams to their second title. (photo © 2003 Debra Tessier)

This seems especially true in view of the manner in which the Lady Bantams dominated last month's Howe Cup, in which they won all three of their meets 9-0, an unprecedented achievement in the three-decade history of this event, and a marked contrast to the bare-margin pair of 5-4 wins they had eked out against Harvard in the dual meet and Howe Cup final in 2002. This triple-whitewash is buttressed by the near-total absence of seniors on this year's squad and the imposing strength of the recruiting class set to enter Trinity this coming autumn.

That group and the returning letter winners will be led by Amina Helal, who successfully defended her 2002 Individuals title this past weekend, and by Siu Lynn Leong, a finalist in the Individuals last season who lost in this year's semis to Penn senior Runa Reta. The latter enjoyed an undefeated (9-0) dual-meet season, including a four-game win over Helal, who however avenged that loss in the finals of both the Betty Constable Invitational and, as noted, the Ramsay Cup competition to determine the intercollegiate women's individual champion.

Yale freshman Michelle Quibell also upset Helal in the regular season before losing to her in the Constable and Ramsay semis and (barely, in a fifth-set tiebreaker from two-love up) Howe Cup team final, to which Quibell and her Eli teammates advanced by virtue of the 8-1 thrashing they administered on their home courts to Harvard, which was the first victory over this arch-rival for Yale women's coach Mark Talbott in his five-year tenure in New Haven.

Quibell recorded her first-ever win over her career nemesis Louisa Hall that evening, but Hall and her galvanized, revenge-seeking Crimson teammates reversed this setback in the far more important meeting between these two elite teams for the 2003 Ivy League championship just four days later in Cambridge, where with the team score knotted at four matches apiece, Hall saved a fourth-game game-ball against
her and clinched the match and the team title that went with it in a 10-8 tiebreaker victory. It was the second 5-4 loss to Harvard this season for the Yale women (who had also bowed by that score in the preseason Ivy Scrimmages) and one of five by that agonizing margin (of six defeats overall) by the combined Yale men's and women's squash varsities in 2002-2003 to their Big Three rivals Princeton and Harvard.

PRINCETON MEN EDGE YALE

The Yale Elis Fought Valiantly throughout the 02-03 campaign. (photo © 2003 Debra Tessier)

Of these the most important (along with the foregoing) was the battle in early February between the Princeton Tiger and Yale Eli men's teams that ultimately decided the Ivy League crown. Dave Talbott's New Haven troops have now probably had their fill of losing 5-4 to Bob Callahan's charges, including both 2001-2002 clashes, the first of which had decided the Ivy League title for that year and the second
of which had cost Yale a berth in the Potter Cup final. In each of those meetings, Yale's superior depth had caused an Eli sweep of the Nos. 6-9 slots but Princeton's sweep of the top five, 80% of which is directly attributable to the exploits of the class of 2003 quartet comprised by Will Evans, David Yik, Danny Rutherford and Eric Pearson, had enabled the Tigers to carry the day.

At Yale these four stalwarts, deemed the best graduating class in Princeton squash history by 22-year head coach Callahan, all won their respective matches but the Eli repeat and counter-balancing sweep of the bottom four created an all-or-nothing showdown between No. 1 players Julian Illingworth of Yale and Yasser El-Halaby of Princeton, both freshmen, as was Harvard No. 1 Will Broadbent, the first time that all Big Three schools had freshmen atop the varsity ladder. Illingworth surged to 2-0, 8-4, just one point from what would have been Yale's first Ivy League title in 13 years,
to the raucous approval of the packed Yale gallery.

But El-Halaby, in a preview of what his teammate Evans would accomplish exactly one month later in an almost identical circumstance in the Individuals (of which more anon), saved that match-ball and never permitted another, running that game out and
dominating the fourth and fifth games as well to give his four senior teammates their second consecutive Ivy League championship and third in their four varsity seasons.

Yale's subsequent 5-4 win over Harvard would give the Elis their first road victory over their arch-rivals in 42 years and second consecutive victory over the Crimson in dual-meet play after a 12-year drought. But also for the second straight year they would see the gains of this win undone, and then some, by a defeat at Harvard's hands several days later in the third-place Potter Cup play-off (after Trinity had overwhelmed Harvard 8-1 and Princeton had done the same to Yale 7-2 in the semis) that would drop Yale to fourth-place overall.

Yale's fade-out during the Potter Cup weekend was substantially due to the nicked-up nature of the top half of their line-up, especially an exhausted, overplayed Illingworth and No. 4 Josh Schwartz, whose early-January hamstring injury kept becoming re-aggravated, to the point where he was forced to default midway through his Princeton
match and sit out the ensuing third/fourth meet one day later against Harvard. Crimson co-captain Dylan Patterson rallied to win the deciding match from two games to one down at No. 4 against Aftab Mathur, and Patterson's teammate Asher Hochberg provided another crucial five-game win at No. 6 as well.

SEASON-LONG PRINCETON-TRINITY BATTLE
Although the back-and-forth that occurred in this longstanding rivalry (in both the men's and the women's divisions) was noteworthy and intriguing, it is in the domination displayed by the Trinity women's team and, more importantly, in the season-long four-part duel between the Princeton and Trinity men's teams that the legacy by which the 2002-2003 CSA season will most be remembered was built. It began in early December in the final of the USSRA Five-Man Team championships, held at defending champion Trinity's home Kellner Courts, and ended three months later in the Intercollegiate Individual championships for the Pool Trophy at the same site.

Right from the start of that initial engagement it was clear that Princeton, buttressed by the uplifting effect of the addition of the immensely talented El-Halaby to its line-up, had fully rid itself of the "compliant foil" role it had been grudgingly forced to play through a trio of one-sided losses the previous season; this change of status was made glaringly clear to Assaiante and his players, whose possible over-confidence
coming into that Five-Man encounter was significantly jolted by the 4-1 battering they received right on their putatively safe home turf that afternoon.

The onslaught was led by 2002 Pool Trophy finalist Evans, who added to his reputation as a Trinity-killer with his win over Trinity senior Nick Kyme, and especially by El-Halaby, who handily defeated 2002 Pool champion Bernardo Samper in what was thought to be a preview of the 2003 Pool Trophy final-round match-up.

Chastened by the fact and margin of this unexpected but decisive setback, the Bantams rose up in all their fury in an 8-1 rout of Princeton in the mid-February dual meet between these heretofore undefeated squads that ended the dual-meet season and decided the CSA championship. One week later, in the Potter Cup final at Jadwin Gymnasium on the Princeton campus, the Tigers swept the top three positions (and almost the top four, until No. 4 Rutherford relinquished his two games to one advantage over Trinity freshman Yvain Badan) but bowed to Trinity's storied depth, which in the course of these five consecutive Potter Cup championships has produced a combined record of 74-1 in the Nos. 5-9 positions (!) and which fueled an eventual
6-3 team triumph.

It is always a little double-edged when a team's best performers are out-played and wind up depending on their supporting cast to bail them out, and this theme was accentuated in the Pool tournament just this past weekend, which devolved into a pair of semi-finals featuring Trinity players facing Princeton opponents.

Yasser El Halaby won the Intercollegiate Mens Singles. (photo © 2003 Ron Beck)

Trinity No. 1 and defending champion Samper faced Princeton No. 2 Evans, Samper's final-round victim in last year's event, following which Princeton No. 1 El-Halaby went up against Trinity No. 2 Michael Ferreira. The latter had advanced to that juncture via a quarter-final rout of the higher-seeded Yalie Illingworth, an occurrence that was totally absent from the women's concomitant event, in which all 31 matches were won (usually in three games) by the higher-ranked player, culminating in the top-seeded defending champion Helal's final-round win over No. 2 Reta.

By contrast, the men's semis devolved into a memorable and emotional double-epic that came within three points of producing an all-Trinity final but ended up in an all-Princeton final instead: leading 2-1, 8-3 against Evans, Samper succumbed to searing cramps in both thighs that kept him from winning that match-ball or achieving another and forced him to retire midway through the fifth game after dropping what became the do-or-die fourth in a tiebreaker. Then Ferreira took a two-games to love lead over El-Halaby and later served at 7-7 in the fourth, but lost that game 9-7 and was overwhelmed in the 9-1 fifth by the Egyptian-born star, whose brilliance the following afternoon in the final was much more than his determined but out-classed
teammate Evans could handle.

THE TALLY SHEET
So Trinity earned both of the important team CSA championships, as well as the right to an updating of the Highway Sign on Interstate 84 near Hartford that salutes the "Trinity College Men's And Women's 2001-2002 National Champions."

But it must be said that Princeton won all but one of the top-of-the-line-up clashes between these two titans over the multi-front course of the past season, and that, even before the final was played, their leading Tiger guns had ensured a return of the permanent Pool Trophy to the Jadwin trophy case where it had reposed throughout the recent three-year period from 1999-2001 due to the combined and sequential accomplishments of the Yik brothers, Peter and David, both of whom were CSA Sportsmanship Award recipients following their senior seasons as well. There is no doubt that the challenge the Tigers posed to the previously free-and-easy Trinity dynasty constitutes a compelling symbol of the resurgence of a number of college programs, notably Penn and Cornell in the men's division and Penn, Dartmouth and Williams (which recorded its first-ever win over Princeton) in the women's ranks, and
of the rising vitality of the college game as a whole.

All of this augurs well for the future of CSA squash, as does the ascent of a number of American-born players such as Broadbent, Illingworth, Dartmouth's Ryan Donegan and Penn's Rich Repetto, as well as Quibell, Hall and her Harvard teammate Lindsey Wilkins, who contributed an important win at No. 2 in Harvard's 5-4 victory over Yale. All seven of these players are underclassmen save Hall, a junior, and the strides they have made this past season bear testimony to the influence of the USSRA Junior programs and, as well, constitute an optimistic sign of the future of American squash on the international scene.

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