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Celebration And Succession
One of Bennett’s main hallmarks was his absolute fairness; the weekly (occasionally biweekly) challenge matches were the sole determinant of the team line-up; winners moved up (or stayed at the top in the case of those at No. 1), losers moved down. There were no exceptions and no excuses. It is a testament to the renown Bennett (who retired following another stellar season in 1960-61) earned, and to the respect and affection that his players came to have for him, that the undefeated national champion 1964 Harvard squash team, on which four of his former players (the three 1960 Interschols semifinalists and Denny Lewis) played major roles, invited him to their end-of-season victory banquet and presented him with an illuminated scroll extolling his contributions to the game. When Bennett died a little over a year later (in March 1965) of cancer at age 59, a number of his former players, colleagues and students attended the funeral.

The large footsteps Bennett left behind upon his retirement as squash coach after his praiseworthy three-decade run were filled by Donald Dunbar, a young PEA mathematics teacher and, like Bennett, a prep school and college baseball standout who was Bennett’s assistant coach during the latter’s last few seasons. Dunbar was on the same Amherst pitching staff as Bill Wilson, PEA class of ’48, who has won a number of age-group national squash titles in the 60’s, 65’s and 70’s during the past dozen years and who as a minor league pitcher in Jacksonville in the early 1950’s had an infield behind him that featured a youthful and slender second baseman from Mobile, Alabama named Henry Aaron.

Dunbar, who would also become a highly successful PEA soccer coach, inherited a team that had not a single returning letterman when he made his head-coaching debut during the 1961-62 season, but the experience his young squad gained during that 4-4 campaign paid off richly the following year when the team unexpectedly captured the Interschols and captain Ray Godfrey even more unexpectedly won the individual Interschols title. The latter, who as a lower had at Bennett’s behest played for a full month with his right bicep roped to his side in order to make him acquire the elbow-close-to-the-side swing Bennett preferred, had not even been a clear No. 1 his senior year, spending the winter of 1963 alternating at that slot with Gordon Black.

But in the Interschols tourney in late-February, he managed to knock off first Larry Terrell (who was only 14 at the time but who seven years later would win the Intercollegiate Individual crown), then Rick Sterne (later ranked in the USSRA top 10 and the winner of the 1989 U. S. 40-and-over event) and finally a heavily favored Larry Heath, who would win the U. S. Junior tournament the following autumn and who had badly defeated Godfrey in the Deerfield-Exeter dual meet a few weeks prior to the Interschols.

Throughout his subsequent squash years, first at Yale and later in the New York amateur leagues, Godfrey would evince a capacity to come up with a noteworthy win when it was least expected. Certainly the most dramatic of these breakthroughs came in the early 1970’s when he knocked off the redoubtable Victor Niederhoffer when the latter was right in the midst of the four consecutive U. S. national championships he won from 1972-75. But the first of Godfrey’s eyebrow-raising results occurred in that 1963 Interschols, which catapulted Godfrey and his talented teammates Black, Chris Gadsden (the PEA captain the following season and a ’68 Yale captain as well) and Craig Stapleton (who would become a solid collegian at Harvard) to a 3-2 season-ending win over Andover, avenging a loss by that same narrow margin in late January.

Andover Takes Over
However, led by their coach Lou Hoitsma (who would guide the Big Blue from 1958-80) and a host of gifted racquet athletes, Andover would completely dominate the rivalry for the ensuing decade-plus, sweeping through 22 consecutive E-A meets, usually by lopsided scores, while seizing a half-dozen Interschols team titles and producing some of the strongest rosters, in any sport, in the school’s history. The 1970-71 squad, as one example, featured three players (Seth Walworth, Steve Sherrill and Frank Dupont) who cracked the strong Yale starting nine as freshmen the following season, and the Andies were led by captain Peter Blasier, the Interschols Individual finalist that year and later Harvard’s captain and No. 1, and Dick Cashin, who would become an Olympic medal-winner as an oarsman. Bill Kaplan, who would win the Interschols two years later (i.e. in 1973) and become Harvard’s captain and No. 1, and Tom Raleigh, a solid member of mid-1970’s Princeton teams that won Ivy League and national college titles, were not even able to make the Andover starting seven that year.

While Andover was fielding immensely powerful teams year after year throughout that time, the Exeter program was struggling through a transition period during which a number of instructors tried their hand as coaches (in addition to Dunbar, Nick Moutis, Hamilton Bissell ’29 and Dave Thomas all took turns at the position) and the team mostly posted records at or near the .500 mark. Certainly a number of excellent players represented the Academy during that time, most notably Dave Fish ’68, a highly ranked junior tennis player who quickly picked up squash and eventually captained both teams first at Exeter and later at Harvard.

In fact Fish, after a few years as Barnaby’s assistant during the closing stretch of that New England icon’s 44-year run, ascended to the head position of the Crimson squash and tennis programs in the fall of 1976 and began a coaching record that has become fully the equal of the two giants (i.e. Cowles and Barnaby) that preceded him. During his 13 years at the squash helm before he decided to devote himself full-time to tennis, Fish’s teams never lost to arch-rival Yale and annexed numerous Ivy League and national collegiate championships, and the inspirational impact of Fish’s low-key presence may have been best expressed when his out-manned but determined 1989 team routed a far superior Yale squad to give their revered and beaming-with-pride coach the best possible good-bye present.

Dave Fish '68 went on to coach squash and tennis at Harvard

Brandes immediately gained an appreciation for the athletic, psychological and strategic aspects of the sport and the imagery it conjured up for him as being “three-dimensional billiards” and “geometry in motion.” After completing his dissertation in late January and mailing it to Munich, Brandes made a celebratory trip to the Academy bookstore, where almost as a lark he purchased several comic books and, more pertinently, a sturdy Maine Line squash racquet.

That spring, Wilson practiced a fair amount on his own in preparation for his (ultimately quite successful) college career at Yale and gave Brandes some squash pointers, thereby launching his faculty advisor’s career as a squash coach. Soon Brandes was competing with some of the other faculty members (Jeff Fleishman, Ed Wall, Harris Thomas and Dave Robbins most prominently among them), and making the obligatory trip to Cambridge for a lesson with Barnaby himself. Armed with the invaluable information and advice he received during his hour-long session with the legendary Crimson master, Brandes was ready for his move into the PEA head coaching position, which occurred in the fall of 1968 when David Thomas became the Head of College Placement and later Dean of Students, positions which precluded him from continuing as varsity coach.

The impact Brandes would make on the Academy varsity squash program during the considerable span of his 24-year head coaching tenure was profound and enduring. He was a firm believer in Barnaby’s philosophy of “coaching deep,” and, like Bennett before him, he ran an active challenge-match ladder (two matches per week, even during the heart of the schedule) and developed a methodical series of drills and practice routines, including a “Princeton points” session, so named because it was used at the Princeton summer squash camps, that would force the players to focus on long “percentage” exchanges during decreasing-point tiebreaker sessions (i.e. best-of nine, then best-of five, then best-of-three, then two one-pointers), with the winner staying in the court and the loser having to move to the right. All of these techniques were designed as strategy sharpeners and attention getters, as well as to make his charges (most of whom entered Exeter having never played squash before) learn to focus and to cope with pressure.

Arif Sarfraz won the Interscholastic Title for Exeter in 1972

With the help of Chuck Kinyon, a phys-ed instructor who later became the Director of Racquet Sports at Dartmouth, Brandes also organized the Exeter Open, an annual tournament that by its ninth and last edition in 1984 had become a fixture on the USSRA amateur circuit, with more than 100 entrants from as far away as Chicago, Washington D.C., Atlanta and Philadelphia. In addition, he ran the Bavarian Open (faculty championship); drove his varsity players to Boston for informal matches against MIT and the Union Boat Club (assisted by club member Joe Bowen, who moved to Exeter upon his retirement in the mid-1970’s and became a loyal supporter of Exeter squash); supervised the Lockett Cup (the annual school championship) and the Warren Williams event (for club players); planned several early-1980’s co-ed Christmas vacation trips to the squash-rich Philadelphia region to give PEA’s best players additional match experience against top schools as Haverford, Episcopal and Shipley; and revived the annual matches between the PEA faculty and their Andover counterparts that had been so popular during the 1940’s and 1950’s, when both schools actually entered faculty teams which traveled into Boston every Tuesday evening to compete in leagues run by the Massachusetts regional squash association. These events often drew as many as 20 to 25 participants a side under Brandes’s organizational leadership while creating a bond between the faculty members of these now co-ed two schools that belied the rivalry that existed when their respective varsity teams clashed at the end of a sports season.

Brandes frequently drove to Boston to see high-profile squash events like the Boston Open, a major stop on the World Pro Squash Association (WPSA) tour, the Boston Eye-Opener in Allston, important Harvard Ivy League meets and Massachusetts-hosted national junior tourneys. During these trips, he befriended such high-profile Boston-based squash standouts as Mohibullah Khan, one of only four players to win both the British Open and North American Open, the most important softball and hardball titles respectively. Mo Khan came up to play an exhibition in 1970 to dedicate the 12-court squash complex that arrived that year with the opening of the George H. Love Gymnasium.

The advent of those courts brought Exeter back into the limelight of east coast squash and allowed the Academy to play a prominent role in the popularity explosion that the game was undergoing nationally and indeed world-wide during the early 1970’s. They attracted such elite Boston-based amateurs as Lenny Bernheimer and Tom Poor, both ranked in the USSRA top-ten, who would occasionally dash up I-95 in a Datsun 280 Z during their lunch break to give a demo and hit with the varsity before heading back to Boston. Both won the Exeter Open, as did Ron Beck, Charlie Duffy and Greg Zaff, who at one time ascended to the No. 2 ranking on the WPSA pro hardball circuit. As proof of the regard that his colleagues gained for him during his tenure, the New England Interscholastic Team Trophy for the best seven-man team based on regular-season competition came to be known as the Brandes Cup.

It was a coaching tip Brandes delivered to his senior captain Arif Sarfraz ’72 that helped get the latter to the finish line of the Interschols that year. The Pakistani native had managed a hard-earned two- games to one final-round lead over Middlesex star Bill Strong, who had prevented what would have been the first all-Exeter final in the 12 years since Williams-Robinson by edging Sarfraz’s teammate Bob Fisher in a five-game semi. But Strong was coming on by the end of the third game and the match was definitely still in the balance. During the between-game break, Brandes urged Sarfraz, whose crisp forehand rail was his most potent weapon, to consistently attack the left-handed Strong’s relatively weaker backhand rather than steer the ball over to Strong’s forehand, which had produced most of his winners to that point.

Sarfraz responded with a perfect application of this stratagem, which enabled him to race out to an early lead and close out the match in decisive 15-6 fashion to give the Exeter program its first Interschols individual champion since Godfrey’s heroics nine years earlier. Sarfraz would be one of three Exeter captains---Thor Kayeum ’74 and Bill Fisher ’75 were the others---to be in the starting lineup of the 1976 Princeton squad that defeated reigning champ Harvard in the season-ending Intercollegiate team tournament.

"Hammy" - Hamilton Bissell

His wily left-handed racquet skills used to delight and bedevil Exonians on both the squash and tennis courts; so did the black shorts (sawed off charcoal-grey flannel slacks that kept his upper legs warm) he favored, which team members used to joke were selected to give him an advantage, since the black squash ball would be harder for an opponent to pick up against the background of those shorts. Hammy’s inspirational contributions to an Exeter squash season were limited only by the frequent two- and three-week forays (over 400,000 miles in all) he had to make each year to other regions in fulfillment of his Academy obligations in student recruiting as director of scholarships and later on as associate director of development in the alumni affairs office.

His son Jack, class of ’58, enthusiastically recalls the squash team breakfasts at his father’s house early in the morning before the players headed off to the Interschols with Hammy’s pep talks still ringing in their ears, and Coach Brandes frequently pulled his car into 11 Elliott Street, where Bissell and his wife Sally lived, when the team returned to campus after away matches so his players could regale Hammy with detailed reports of that afternoon’s action. Jack Bissell described poignantly how in the fall of 1987, when his mother was dying of cancer, one of her last acts was to ask her son to make sure to give Hammy a “modern” technifiber squash racquet (he had stuck with his wood model long after it had fallen out of vogue) as a present on her behalf.

Hammy’s official retirement in 1976 after a 43-year career was in name only, as he continued to coach club squash until 1992, by which time he was 81 years old. He was a big advocate of what he called the “Good King Wenceslas” theory of hitting the ball “Deep and Crisp and Even” and his frequent advice to beginners, particularly applicable to the original cold Thompson courts, was to “keep yourself warm, keep the ball warm, and keep your opponent warm (and eventually tire him out.”

There is a permanent “Hammy Spot” on the concrete in the foyer of the gym near the courts on which he used to rest his head while sitting and waiting to check in arriving players. Permanent as well is the impact this immortal Exeter icon (who died in November 2000 at the ripe age of 89) would have on all things Exeter, partial proof of which is his honorary class membership in SEVEN PEA classes, an all-time record that is likely to stand forever, in addition of course to his actual graduating class of 1929. Bell House, the admissions office on Front Street across from Tan Lane, was re-named Bissell House a few years ago in honor of this great man.

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