By Rob Dinerman, SquashTalk staff

December 30---Harvard freshman Will Broadbent, Williams senior captain Adrienne Ellman and Princeton teammates Will Osnato ’04 and Dent Wilkens ’05 emerged triumphant from a hectic three days of singles and doubles action at the University Club of New York, which hosted its annual college invitationals this past weekend to determine the men’s and women’s winners of the George Cummings Cup and the CSA intercollegiate doubles champion for the 2002-2003 season.

Harvard Frosh Will Broadbent (r) overwhelmed #1 seed, Denison's Javier Castilla (l) in the UClub final - trophy presented by Bill McDonough  (Photo © 2002 Bill McDonough)

Broadbent in particular had a busy holiday stretch, emulating last year’s Crimson captain Pete Karlen by reaching both the singles and doubles finals and thereby playing no fewer than nine combined matches! Like Karlen, he earned a split in his pair of finals, though unlike his predecessor, who let a 2-1, 6-0 advantage slip away against Trinity’s Lefika Ragontse, Broadbent’s victory came in the singles portion of this event, which began more than a half-century ago and was revived four years back after a lengthy hiatus during the early- and mid-1990’s.

Ironically, the most difficult of the quintet of matches the third-seeded Broadbent had to win came against his own teammate and frequent practice partner Dylan Patterson, the current Crimson captain and No. 3 player, whose familiarity with Broadbent’s game may have played a partial role in his 9-5 third-game victory, the only game Broadbent dropped all weekend, though the latter responded to this brief setback by closing out the match in no-nonsense 9-2 fourth-game fashion. The 6 foot-4 inch Harvard No. 1 then routed Anschul Manchanda, the second-seeded Yale junior, 9-1, 1 and 2 in the ensuing semi-final Saturday afternoon and thereby earned the right to face top seed Javier Castilla of Denison College in the final.

Castilla’s path to the final of this 41-player draw had been facilitated by the prior elimination (actually, in the case of fourth seed Eric Pearson, self-elimination) of several of the players who had been seeded to oppose him. Yale captain Chris Olsen had been upset by Trinity’s Carl Baglio, who then bowed to Castilla in four in the quarters, and Pearson’s failure to appear for his scheduled quarter-final with Yale’s A. J. McCrery ushered the latter, who plays in the bottom third of the strong Eli line-up, into the semis, where he proved unable to cope with the Colombian Castilla’s superior firepower. Ironically, this sequence of events may have actually worked to Castilla’s disadvantage by leaving him unprepared for the quality Broadbent threw at him throughout their final, which was played before an appreciative gallery Sunday morning.

Princeton's Will Osnato and Dent Wilkins (r) won the doubles over Harvard's Broadbent and Patterson (Photo © 2002 Bill McDonough)

Castilla, who has won all-American honors for the past several years, actually played pretty well, displaying his exceptional mobility and blasting away whenever he had the chance; that he still lost by the one-sided score of 9-3, 3 and 0 was totally due to the brilliance of Broadbent’s game, especially along the left wall, where his rails, lobs and drop shots (some of them coming on balls off the back wall) were so precise and well-struck that Castilla often couldn’t scrape them back into play. Especially considering his height and somewhat gangly self-presentation, Broadbent is remarkably graceful and possessed of outstanding footwork, though his hands are good enough that he was even able to keep the ball tight to the wall when forced to reach across his body and swing without turning his feet.

He also uses the height of the court well and in general has a game whose sophistication level is way above his relatively tender years and, more pertinently, well above Castilla’s, though the latter kept plugging away, hoping for the Broadbent let-up that never came. By the mid-point of the third game, Castilla had understandably become deflated by the fruitlessness of the major effort he had been expending, and tinned several balls on shots that he had attempted out of desperation. His self-exhortatory yells had abated as had much of the energy that he had heretofore exuded. The final point, which ended on an only mid-paced Broadbent backhand rail that however was so glued to the wall that Castilla barely foul-tipped it, fully exemplified the tenor of the entire 42-minute match, which was completely defined by the superiority of Broadbent’s execution over that of his doughty but (on this day, at least) out-classed opponent.

Williams Adrienne Ellman (l) stopped Brown's Lilian Rosenthal (r) in the womens final. (Photo © 2002 Bill McDonough)

The 18 contestants who entered the second women’s edition of the Cummings Cup (named in honor of the man who served as head University Club pro for the FIFTY-year period between 1916 and 1966!) competed in four separate round-robin pools, with the top two finishers in each division then playing a regular quarters-semis-final eight-player tournament. Defending 2001 champion Lauren Doline of Yale got past last year’s runner-up Clare Whipple to reach the semis, where she was stopped in straight games by Brown sophomore and No. 1 player Lillian Rosenthal, a Middlesex alumna who travels at least once a week to the Harvard Club of Boston to receive coaching from Sharon Bradey, a former world-ranked player who is currently the head coach of the U. S. women’s team.

The bottom half saw Whipple’s Williams teammate Ellman, a product of the vaunted Heights Casino junior program who has played at No. 1 throughout her four-year varsity career, defeat Yalies Sarah Coleman and Devon Dalzell to reach the final and the rematch it represented with Rosenthal, who had handily defeated her when they met last winter in the Williams-Brown dual meet. That result 11 months ago was substantially attributable to the fast pace of the match, which suited the explosive power and speed that drive Rosenthal’s game.

Yale Past and Present: SquashTalk's Rob Dinerman speaks with Second Tier Women's event winner Abbie McDonough.    (Photo © 2002 Bill McDonough)

This time, by contrast, Ellman was determined to slow the points down by lobbing frequently and holding her shots as long as possible in order to keep Rosenthal back on her heels. The Williams senior also planned to take advantage both of the experience edge she enjoyed and of the confidence infusion she had recently received in London, where she had spent the entire week before the tournament training with the Williams men’s team and receiving coaching from the world renowned coach Dave Pearson, the mentor of world No. 1 Peter Nicol, whose advice on stroking technique had refined and significantly improved Ellman’s drop shot.

The truth of the foregoing was demonstrated throughout the women’s final, as was the wisdom of Ellman’s slow-it-down strategy, which kept the compact but powerful Rosenthal from ever finding a consistent rhythm. Every once in a while, she erupted with a blasted winner or extraordinary retrieval (the best half-dozen gets of the match were probably all hers), but the impact of these bursts of athleticism was contained both by Ellman’s praiseworthy unflappability and by Rosenthal’s inability to mount a sustained run; all too often she would follow a point-winning effort with a poor serve that Ellman would put away for a quiet winner or evince great intensity on one point only to give up on a gettable ball on the next. When she gets better at harnessing her considerable arsenal, Rosenthal has the potential to become a formidable force on the intercollegiate scene, and as noted she is still only partway through her sophomore year and thus has plenty of time to make these improvements, particularly with a figure as respected as Bradey nurturing her progress.

But on this late-December morning, her output was too uneven to match that of Ellman, the 13th ranked collegian in 2001-2002, whose masterful variety and confidence belied last season’s loss to Rosenthal, which she decisively avenged with a downhill tally of 9-5, 4 and 2. The “2nd tier” tournament for the nine players who were eliminated from the main draw in the pool competition was won by Yale’s Abbie McDonough, the daughter of Tournament and University Club Athletic Committee Chairman Bill McDonough, who rose superior to Rosenthal’s Brown teammate Julie Flygare in a three-game final.

There has been an Intercollegiate Doubles championship ever since 1988, when Keen Butcher and Ron Rubin defeated Yale’s Alex Dean and Eric Wohlgemuth on a quiet late-winter weekend at Racquet & Tennis. This year, for the second consecutive time, the tournament (named the Ketcham Cup in honor of the beloved 83-year-old squash luminary and Hall Of Fame inductee Treddy Ketcham, who along with two others donated the permanent trophy) was grafted onto the University Club’s Cummings Cup competition, and Princeton’s Osnato and Wilkens duplicated the exploits of their Tiger forebears Butcher and Rubin and emerged victorious from a 16-team field. Like Broadbent in the singles, they were placed in the draw’s third quadrant and thus obliged to defeat the second seed in the semis and the top seed in the final. In this case, that meant Trinity’s Pat Malloy and Baglio followed by Harvard’s Broadbent and Patterson.

The latter had teamed up with the now-departed Karlen to win the final over Trinity’s Baglio and Nadeem Osman, who led 13-11 in the fifth before eventually losing in a tiebreaker. This time it was Patterson’s team that held late-game leads only to stumble down the stretch---9-3 up in the first game, they slumped to a 15-10 defeat; ahead 12-8 in the second, they couldn’t win a single additional point from there. They led only briefly in the third before eventually falling behind 12-9, rallying to knot the game at 12 but ultimately losing 15-13 when Osnato, who had tinned Patterson/Broadbent back from their deficit to 12-all, stabbed an audacious back-hand reverse-corner winning volley that died in front of Patterson’s desperate forward lunge on the weekend’s final point.

The sophomore Wilkens appeared to have the best knowledge of doubles strategy of any of the four finalists, and his high three-walls and lofted crosscourt lobs kept Patterson scurrying back to the court’s nether regions, from which he hit a number of balls that soared over the front wall or were gobbled up by the University Club’s uncharacteristically low ceiling. Broadbent, barely an hour removed from his convincingly triumphant but strenuous singles final, had understandably lost some of his energy level and seems possibly better suited to the left wall that Patterson instead was occupying. Each of the Crimson stand-outs seemed to lose confidence in both himself and his partner, especially after the unforced and damaging errors each contributed during that disastrous seven-point swoon that cost them a second game the winning of which would have evened the match at a game apiece and, more importantly, restored order after the loss of that roller-coaster opening game.

Instead, Osnato and Wilkens emerged from that game with a 2-0 lead and a burgeoning belief that a match they had entered as underdogs was now very much theirs for the taking. That kind of momentum can be very difficult to quell in doubles and the Harvard representatives by then were too flustered and tentative to come all the way back, though even at match’s end, many of the spectators were left to wonder what would have ultimately happened had Osnato’s last salvo caught the tin (instead of barely clearing it) and Harvard had won the ensuing tiebreaker. The Harvard stars seemed always on the verge of asserting themselves, but to Osnato’s and Wilkens’s credit, they were able to win the match before that prospect was ever permitted to materialize. Their win gave another boost to the defending Ivy League champion Princeton program, which defeated five-time and current CSA team champion Trinity 4-1 earlier this month in the final of the USSRA Five-Man Team championships is thus well on its way to a very special 2002-2003 season.

RECAP FROM QUARTER-FINAL ROUND

Men’s Quarters:
Javier Castilla (Denison) d Carl Baglio (Trinity), 3-1;
A. J. McCrery (Yale) d Eric Pearson (Princeton), default;
Will Broadbent (Harvard) d Dylan Patterson (Harvard), 3-1;
Anschul Manchanda (Yale) d Pat Malloy (Trinity), 3-0.

Semis:
Castilla d McCrery, 3-0;
Broadbent d Manchanda, 3-0

Final:
Broadbent d Castilla, 9-3, 9-3 and 9-0.

Women’s Quarters:
Lauren Doline (Yale) d Clare Whipple (Williams, 3-1;
Lillian Rosenthal (Brown) d Kari Betts, 3-0;
Adrienne Ellman (Williams) d Sarah Coleman, 3-0,
Devon Dalzell (Yale) d Annie Warner, 3-0.

Semis:
Rosenthal d Doline, 3-0; Ellman d Dalzell, 3-1

Final:
Ellman d Rosenthal, 9-5, 4 and 2.

Doubles Quarters:
Patterson/Broadbent d Porter/Cheng, 3-0;
Pearson/Boothby d Olsen/Rees, 3-0;
Osnato/Wilkens d Vinci/Cumberbatch, 3-0;
Baglio/Malloy d Smith/Wadwha, 3-0

Semis:
Patterson/Broadbent d Pearson/Boothby, 3-0;
Osnato/Wilkens d Baglio/Malloy, 3-1

Final: Osnato/Wilkens d Patterson/Broadbent, 15-10, 12 and 13.

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