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A three-time U. S. national champion and future Hall Of Fame inductee was a member of the first-ever squad. One of the best women’s players in American history, also a Hall Of Famer, graced the PEA courts five decades later. Three of the coaches logged well over 70 years at the helm between them. No fewer than 10 Big Red representatives captured the New England Interschols individual trophy. And a host of alumni/ae went on to stellar careers on nationally-ranked college varsities, in USSRA and WPSA amateur and professional tournaments and as respected administrators of the sport, making an enduring mark on national and world ranking lists and as coaches, managers and decision-makers in the sport’s ongoing evolution.

What all of these figures have in common is the quality of having been part of the history of squash at the Phillips Exeter Academy, a proud and storied tradition which is now entering the 75th year of its existence. The harsh and gritty environment of the Academy courts when the program began in the fall of 1931 required one to traverse a 25-yard frigid and pitch-black tunnel to access two rows of four courts each, with a catwalk that doubled as a gallery in between. It was by any measurement a far cry from the magnificent new Fisher Squash Center, a beautifully lit and arrayed world of its own featuring ten glass-back-wall courts with gallery space for 400 spectators (500 if one includes standing room) and constituting a squash paradise in the very heart of the George H. Love Gymnasium. But the essence of the program has endured from the inaugural 1931-32 varsity team through all the coaches and decades that have followed and up to the present time.

Germain Glidden, famous Squash Champion and cartoonist, got his start at Exeter.

Bennett used to drive his team to away matches in his family station wagon, which could hold only five passengers in addition to the driver. It is believed to be for this reason, and due to this limitation in the capacity of Bennett’s vehicle, that the early years of interscholastic dual squash meets consisted of five-man teams, a practice that extended all the way into the 1970’s before the seven-player format began!

George Bennett Founded and Built the Squash Program at Exeter.

Bennett’s squash coaching career would extend nearly three more decades, finally ending with the 1960-61 team. He produced two more Intercollegiate champions, Jack Holt ’39, who won the college title as a Yale senior in 1943 and Glenn Shiveley ‘45, also an Eli, who won the event when it resumed after a World War II hiatus, beating former Exeter teammate Roger Sonnabend ’43 of MIT along the way in the semis. The no-frills English teacher was known for preaching depth and for his advocacy of slice as a weapon to enable his players’ shots to die quickly on the cold courts that were the norm during his tenure. Bennett was said to have embraced this approach largely as a consequence of the fact-finding trips he made in the early 1930’s to Harvard, whose legendary Hall Of Fame coach Harry Cowles had been an assistant court tennis pro at the Newport Casino in Rhode Island prior to becoming the Harvard squash coach.

In court tennis, a premium is placed on making the ball die as close to the walls as possible and one’s capacity to accomplish this is enhanced when the racquet slices across the ball rather than stroking straight-on through it. Cowles, and subsequently Bennett, correctly perceived the transferability of this concept to squash. When one of Cowles’s most devoted pupils, Jack Barnaby, succeeded him in the mid-1930’s at the Crimson helm, it became that much easier during the several decades of the latter’s glorious reign for Exeter players to transition into the Harvard program, since the racquet genealogy of both Bennett and Barnaby stemmed from Harry Cowles, their common mentor.

But it was really not until 1953, when the first squash match against Andover took place (a 5-0 blow-out in which no Exeter player dropped even a single game), and 1954, when the New England Interscholastic Association was formed, that prep school squash really began to take off.

The ’53 team lost only one match, a close 3-2 decision to Deerfield, in compiling what Bennett described in a post-season interview as “the best season in over ten years.” Stalwarts Charlie Kingsley, a letterman as a lower (rare in those predominantly upperclassmen-dominated days), Paul Marden, a three-time Lockett Cup winner as the school champion, and Roger Southall were joined the following season by Charlie Hamm and Richard Hoehn to form a juggernaut that swept to the Interschols team championships in both ’54 and ’55, with Marden taking the individual title in ’54 and Hoehn doing so the following year.

Exeter 1955 Squash Team: From front left: Charlie Kingsley, Poletti, Hamm, Richard Hoehn, Lund, Mr. Bissell, Forbes, Anderson (© 2005 Phillips Exeter Academy)

Virtually all the members of those teams went on to distinguished collegiate careers: Kingsley played No. 1 on Yale teams that won the Intercollegiate team championship at the end of an undefeated 1957-58 season, and that the next year became the only Yale team ever to win the USSRA Five-Man team title; Hoehn, who also won the tennis counterpart to the Interschols in his upper and senior Exeter years, played a starring role in both sports on strong Dartmouth varsities; Southall played No. 2 at Williams; and Hamm was undefeated one year at No. 5 at Harvard. Those teams dominated their annual matches with Andover, which lost the first eight meets in the series (the first five by shut-out 5-0 scores) until finally breaking through for the first time in 1962, the year after Bennett’s retirement from coaching.

Frank Satterthwaite reached a WPSA top ten ranking

The gentle-mannered but quietly confident mentor would begin a season by advising each of his talent-laden late-1950’s squads that he had never lost to Andover and intended to keep it that way. Aiding him in this mission was the frequently present school Principal, William Saltonstall, better known as “Salty,” who combined the size and strength of the hockey player he had once been with fine racquet skills, competitive ardor and a quiet pride when a player he had previously been able to handle improved enough to beat him.

The 1956, ’57 and ’58 teams, led by Romer Holleran ’58 (later a Harvard captain and progenitor of three daughters who would make huge contributions to PEA squash during the decade-long stretch from 1982-91) Gail Borden ’59, a solid and reliable performer who could be counted on in the clutch, and Borden’s classmate Bart McGuire (a late-1970’s recipient of the New York squash association’s coveted Eddie Standing Award “For Sportsmanship Combined With Excellent Play”), sustained only one loss per season to a prep school opponent (Deerfield in each case) and the ’59 team did their immediate predecessors one better when it eked out a taut 3-2 battle with Deerfield and comfortably out-played everyone else.

Exeter 1960 Squash Team: From front left: Frank Satterthwaite, Louis Williams, John Thorndike, Terry Robinson, Mr. Bennett, Jarrett (© 2005 Phillips Exeter Academy)

But the 1960 lineup, boasting seniors Louis Williams and John Thorndike and uppers Frank Satterthwaite and Terry Robinson, may have been the strongest that the Academy had ever fielded to that point, winning six of its eight contests by 5-0 tallies and coming within a single point of an undefeated campaign; leading 14-11 in the fifth game of the deciding match, Thorndike yielded the last four points to Harvard freshman Jay Nelson, later a 20-time U. S. age-group champion, in the return match after Exeter had won the initial meet against the Harvard frosh. Three of the Interschols semifinalists that year---namely Williams, Thorndike and Robinson---were Exonians, with Robinson taking his semi against Thorndike before bowing to team captain Williams in the final.

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