2-10 Princeton Women Shock Harvard: Report

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Monday Nov 11, 2002, Rob Dinerman    Ivy Scrimmages Results

The Men's college season got underway this past weekend with the Ivy League Scrimmage, hosted at Yale, which had plenty of opportunity to emerge the winner had its Nos. 1 and 5 players been able to win any one of the six combined match-game opportunities they held over their rivals from defending Ivy
League champion Princeton late Saturday afternoon.

El Halaby and Illingworth © 2002 Squashtalk

Chief of these is the strength of Princeton's top five, which if anything has even grown from the formidable stature it attained last winter. Of the Will Evans-David Yik-Peter Kelley-Dan Rutherford-Eric Pearson quintet, only Kelley, last year's team captain and undefeated during the regular season at his No. 3 position, has graduated, and the remaining four, all of whom are seniors, have been joined by Yasser el-Halaby, the Egyptian freshman sensation who has already seized the No. 1 spot atop a line-up that features the 2001 Individual Intercollegiate champion in Yik and last year's Individuals finalist in Evans, the New Zealand native whose game reached its absolute peak precisely during the crunch time stretch that occurred last February and March, when all of the most significant matches of a college season occur.

Princeton's two defining meets last season were against Yale, whom they beat in the regular season for the Ivy League title and in the semi-finals of the postseason Potter Trophy, both by 5-4 scores, and in both cases by a sweep of the top five positions that was just enough to overcome a Yale sweep of the Nos. 6-9 slots. The Elis clearly have superior depth, but until they can come up with a breakthrough win in the top five, which they were unable to do in their 10 combined matches last year, they will be unable to claim a win over their Big Three and Ivy League rivals.

What the depth-rich Yale squad has always lacked ever since the college game switched to softball eight years ago has been a superstar at the top-until this season that is, and the arrival onto campus of Julian Illingworth, the reigning USSRA Under-19 champion, who earlier this month upset current Intercollegiate Individual champion Bernardo Samper of Trinity en route to victory in the Price-Bullington Invitational in Richmond, VA.

Illingworth accentuated that accomplishment this past weekend when, in his first intercollegiate performance, he keyed a 7-2 semi-final rout of Harvard with a 3-0 win over Crimson No. 1 James Bullock, which Illingworth's teammate Anschul Manchanda followed at No. 2 with a convincing win over Harvard's hot freshman Will Broadbent, Illingworth's co-finalist in last year's Under-19 Nationals.

Several players from both arch-rival schools were missing due to injury, but
Harvard's top three, namely their killer-B trio of Bullock, Broadbent and
Michael Broadbent were all present, and the Eli sweep of all these augurs very well for the meeting between these schools in late February, where Yale will attempt to defeat Harvard on the latter's home turf in dual-meet competition for what would be the first time in 42 years.

Harvard's pair of victories in their overall defeat came at the Nos. 4 and 5 positions, with the depth of Dave Talbott's crew strongly asserting itself with their dominance of the Nos 6-9 match-ups.

Notwithstanding the fairly one-sided match tally, the Harvard-Yale battle, the second match of the day for each squad in the highly compressed eight-team, one-day scheduling format, left the victorious Yalies having put in much work before their subsequent final, especially in comparison with their Tiger counterparts, who had cruised easily over Cornell in the balancing semi-final.

Despite an agreed extra 1 1/2 hour delay before the finals, Manchanda and Yale No. 3 Josh Schwartz in particular appeared not fully recovered from their matches with Broadbent and Blumberg (who led Schwartz two games to one) respectively. They now faced formidable opposition in Evans and Yik, and both Princetonians won fairly handily.

But the Nos. l and 5 matches were an entirely different story. Illingworth and Chris Olsen both forged their way through first-game tiebreakers, and both then made these hard-won advantages stick by then winning the second game in much easier fashion (9-0 in Illingworth's case against an opponent who seemed a bit rattled both at Illingworth's quality and at the size and vocal capacities of the Yale crowd, which bellowed their support of their newly-arrived hero). Pearson has been a Yale-killer over the years, his five-game win last winter giving the Tigers their clinching victory in that 5-4 outcome, and he firmly wrested control of his Olsen match in the three 9-3 closing chapters at No. 5.

With Illingworth holding a 2 games to 0 lead, attention now focused on the marquee match. While the scrimmages had up to this point been a low key and relaxed affair, with almost total absence of spectators, out of nowhere, as if by signal, a large Yale crowd had gathered to cheer on their new hero Illingworth.

As for El-Halaby, it is to his everlasting credit that he was able to extricate himself from the two-game hole he found himself on enemy turf and against an immensely talented opponent. In the face of Illingsworth's determination and the crowds roars, he responded to the exigency of the moment by picking up the pace, volleying everything within reach, relentlessly working the front of the court, and cutting out the tins that plagued the first two games.

Evening matters via a pair of 9-1 games, El-Halaby was nevertheless challenged once more in the decisive fifth game, which seesawed to 6-all in a fascinating chess match, before the Egyptian Tiger ran out the final three points to an exhausting and exciting 90-minute triumph.

The match now stood at 4-4. In front of no spectators, Gavin Cumberbatch had several game-points in the third game of his match with Rutherford, with Rutherford holding a 2 games to 0 lead, but the Canada native, who has won many important matches for Princeton over the years, was able to catch his
younger opponent at 8-all and win the subsequent tiebreaker and thereby close
out his match and the day's bragging rights.

Saturday's action confirmed Princeton as the team to beat, established Yale as fully worthy challengers for what would be their first Ivy League title since 1990 and ensconced the freshmen Illingworth and El-Halaby as legitimate contenders for the Individuals title currently held by Samper.

Saturday's action would also be the last of any significance of the
weekend. An individual tournament was scheduled for Sunday, with all flights
consisting of eight players competing in a best two-games-out-of-three
format, and the event actually got off the ground with several good matches,
the best of which was probably Illingworth's 70-minute 2-1 win over
Dartmouth's No. 1 Ryan Donegan, but by mid-morning there was a growing
recognition and acceptance of the fact that Saturday's infinitely demanding
regimen had left all the top players too fatigued for it to make any sense to
continue, and by mutual and universal agreement the event was mercifully
called off.

Ironically, the elite players now all play at such a high level that a format that used to work no longer does. There is no sense putting any of these stars in a situation in which they are vulnerable to an injury that could persist through the entire season, and it is a tribute to the wisdom of the players and coaches involved that this decision was made. The best move would seem to be to run the three team rounds over the two days allowed by the NCAA for this tournament and to not even bother with an Individual flight, though that matter will be resolved in coaches conferences later this season.

2002 Ivy Scrimmages at New Haven CT
FINAL ORDER:
1. Princeton 2. Yale 3. Harvard 4.Cornell 5. Penn 6. Dartmouth
7. Brown 8. Columbia

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