Ivy League champions the past two years and Howe Cup winners in 2001, the Harvard women's squash program is bracing for a 2002-2003 season it knows will pose formidable competitive challenges on both the Ivy League and national scenes. The loss of three of the top five members of last year's varsity, the most of any contender, should be more than offset by the arrival of several highly-regarded freshmen and the maturation of a number of returning letter-winners.

Wilkins may be Harvard's key 02-03 weapon (photo © 2002 D Tessier)

Wilkins is an extremely focused competitor who throughout last season demonstrated an ability to physically impose her game that should enable her to enjoy equal success this forthcoming season at the No. 2 position that was filled last year by co-captain Margaret Elias.

The latter and fellow co-captain and team No. 5 Colby Hall both graduated this past May, as did No. 4 Carlin Wing. The only returning member of the top five besides Wilkins is junior and co-captain Louisa Hall, Colby's younger sister and a product of the famed Merion Cricket Club system, who has held the No. 1 position from the moment she entered Harvard in autumn 2000, starting with the opening match of her freshmen year. Backing up this pair of Philadelphians will be sophomore Stephanie Hendricks and senior co-captain Ella Witcher, a Canadian who sustained the most heartbreaking defeat of the season last year in the Howe Cup final against Trinity for the national championship.

Can Louisa Hall beat Amina Helal this season? (photo © 2002 D Tessier)

The remaining members of the septet of returnees from last year's starting line-up are sophomores Hilary Thorndike, whose father John was on Harvard's national championship squash teams in the mid-1960's, and Neeta Lal, and junior Kristin Wadhwa. Thorndike went undefeated last season, mostly at No. 8, and Lal is a native Californian, a decided rarity at the top of women's college squash, who was also a stand-out junior tennis player growing up in Newport Beach. All three graduated from prestigious New England prep schools, Thorndike from Groton, Lal from St. Pauls and Wadhwa from Taft.

The all-North American lineage of this Harvard cast (all American, for that matter, save the Calgary-based Witcher) is in marked contrast to what has recently become the prevailing overseas-dominated composition of most elite intercollegiate programs, a disparity that becomes even more noteworthy in view of the fact that Crimson head coach Satinder Bajwa, now entering his fourth season in Cambridge, is the only non-American coach of any of the top four programs, which in both the men's and women's divisions consist of Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Trinity. This phenomenon even extends to the crop of incoming freshmen, with every other top-echelon school awaiting the arrival of several foreign-born players except the Harvard women, whose squash class of 2006 will consist of Heights Casino's Moira Weigel, Greenwich products Alison Fast and Tina Brown, and Chatham, NJ's Courtney Wallace, Americans all.

Coach Satinder Bajwa (photo © 2002 D Tessier)

Bajwa expects both Weigel and Fast to land in the middle section of this coming year's starting nine, and Brown and Wallace to provide depth at the bottom of the line-up. He acknowledges the key roles that Colby Hall, Elias and Wing have played in the success of the last few seasons and does not minimize the difficulty of replacing three such occupants of the Harvard top five he has coached to Ivy League titles in each of the past two seasons. Nevertheless, Coach Bajwa does see a silver lining in the freshness of the outlook his now decidedly youthful varsity will bring into next season, when his quartet of sophomores (Wilkins, Hendricks, Thorndike and Lal) will be joined by the freshman class. During the past decade, the Harvard women's program has been almost as dynastic as their legendary men's counterpart, winning seven Ivy League titles and six Howe Cups during that span, and the pressure of living up to this history seemed at times burdensome in recent years, including for last season's senior class members that comprised the core of the line-up.

Bajwa is optimistic that the environment will be far less onerous for the underclassmen-oriented squad he will be leading in 2002-2003, and that his players will be able to relax and play better.

Hall in particular may be on the verge of her best season, as she demonstrated with her outstanding performance in the U. S. Women's Team Trials in Seattle in June, when she handily defeated Nationals finalist Meredeth Quick and took three-time Intercollegiate champ Julia Beaver to five close games in a match the winning of which might have landed her a spot on the team that will represent America in the Pan Am Federation event in Ecuador this summer and the World Team Championships in Denmark this fall.

Hall plays with tremendous energy and flair, and with two years at No. 1 under her belt, she and fellow co-captain Witcher should provide much-needed leadership to the host of talented underclassmen that will comprise so much of Harvard's starting nine during

PREDICTED FINISH: IVY: First HOWE CUP: Second

Captain and #1 Louisa Hall in pre-match cheers (photo © 2002 D Tessier)

Freshman Moira Weigel and Yale's Rachita Vora (photo © 2002 D Tessier)