2-10 Princeton Women Shock Harvard: Report

2-2 Trinity men beat Harvard Report   

Latest match results - here

Harvard's Patterson in UClub field (Squashtalk photo: V Winchell)

By Rob Dinerman, SquashTalk staff

Dateline December 26---The University Club of New York will be hosting its annual holiday college invitational this weekend, during which 41men (same number as last year) and 18 women will vie for their respective trophies during the three-day period beginning Friday morning. There will be a doubles event as well in light of the success of last year's inaugural, when Pete Karlen and his Harvard teammate Dylan Patterson narrowly defeated Trinity's Nadeem Osman and Carl Bagglo in a fifth-game tiebreaker.

Patterson will be the only returnee from last year's crop of male finalists, as Karlen and Trinity's Lefika Ragontse (who rallied from two games to one down and 2-6 in the fourth to win 9-7 in the fifth) have both graduated, as has Ragontse's semi-final opponent Hamed Anvari of Dartmouth. Osman is still anunderclassman, but he has struggled with an ankle problem all fall and sensibly decided to rest up for the hectic upcoming college stretch that commences early next month, when he and his Bantam teammates will attempt to extend Trinity's current run of five CSA regular-season and four Potter Trophy postseason titles.

#1 seed, Denison's Javier Castilla (Squashtalk photo: V Winchell)

Patterson is this year's Crimson co-captain, and he will be face his freshman teammate and current Harvard No. 2 Will Broadbent, the third seed, in Saturday afternoon's quarter-finals if both make it that far. Seeded ahead of Broadbent are Denison's Javier Castilla at No. 1 and Yalie Anschul Manchanda, who played in the top position for the Elis all of last season before making way for their freshman sensation Julian Illingworth this autumn.

The Indian native Manchanda and the Colombian Castilla have both earned all-American honors for the past several years, and they will be matched against Trinity's Pat Malloy and Yale's Chris Olsen in their respective quarter-finals if the seeding holds up through the first few rounds.

The fourth seed is Princeton's Eric Pearson, whose Tiger classmates Will Evans, David Yik and Dan Rutherford make the senior class of 2003 the best in school history, according to their veteran coach Bob Callahan. Pearson won the deciding match in the 5-4 victory over Yale this past February without which the Tigers would not have become last year's Ivy League champions, and he made good on his penchant for winning big team matches less than two weeks ago, when he saved more than a half-dozen match-balls in a 10-8 fifth-game win over Malloy that jump-started Princeton to a 4-1 triumph over defending two-time champ Trinity in the final of the USSRA Five-Man Team championship, an outcome that was all the more noteworthy both for the pair of 8-1 Trinity wins over Princeton in 2001-2002 and for coming on Trinity's own turf on the Kellner Courts in Hartford.

It will be interesting to see how both players perform this weekend in the aftermath of their emotional recent meeting, especially Malloy, the highest placed of the participating Trinity contingent, most of whose foreign-born top players are spending the Christmas break with their families. As noted, he is Manchanda's quarter, while Pearson has drawn Cornell's William Chen among the Nos. 5-8 seeds, which are listed as one bloc rather than having a specific seed designated for each.

Somewhat surprisingly, the competition among the 18 women entries will be
staged as a round-robin, with two pools of four players and two pools of five
through the first several days and the respective winners of these pools then
squaring off Sunday in semi-final and final rounds. Yale's Lauren Doline, who won the first-ever women's division last year by defeating Williams stand-out Clare Whipple, will be defending this title, though the field is even deeper (from 13 to 18) and stronger than in 2001. The sophomore Doline is part of a crop of Eli underclasswomen who feel they have a strong chance of annexing the Ivy League and CSA crowns that currently reside at Harvard and Trinity respectively, though the women's intercollegiate field has become so powerful and closely matched at the top that it is almost impossible to designate a clear favorite at this stage of the season.

Other News