SquashTalk >News > USA Men's 2002 Selection Criteria

Team USA Trials Criteria Set
by Rob Dinerman © 2002

April 25, 2002 © 2002      

Incoming Team USA Squash Committee Chairman Mark Lewis and Head Coach Paul Assaiante have announced the selection criteria for the U. S. Team that will compete in the 2002 Pan American Federation Cup, which is scheduled to be held in Quito, Ecuador August 23rd to September 1st.

Eight players will be invited to participate in the Team Trials, which will be conducted in the greater New York area from July 26-28. To be eligible for an invitation, players were required to play in the S. L. Green Championships hosted at Yale early this past March and in at least one of the two $5,000 events, the Trinity Open in January and the Westchester Classic in February, that were specifically created to provide data for the team selection process.

All three of these events were only open to team-eligible American players to maximize the opportunity for pertinent head-to-head results, and a final 2001-2002 ranking list will be compiled from the results of the main draw and feed-in consolation of these tournaments, plus any other head-to-head matches in sanctioned tournaments this season.

Since the last of the two remaining tournaments, the Hyder Cup in Manhattan (following the Mud Bowl in Dartmouth), won't be completed until the end of May, the final ranking will be published on the first Monday of June and will count for 75% of the invitation process, with the S. L. Green event accounting for the remaining 25%.

Players are also required to submit at least 10 match results, other than for a medical exemption, though anyone who played in three or more such sanctioned tourneys would be likely to meet this standard. This pre-Trials ranking will count 40% towards the overall team selection process, with performance in the actual Trials counting another 40% and the S.L. Green rankings worth the final 20%. When all of those weighted calculations have been made, the top four point-getters will be awarded spots on the team, which withdrew from last October's Pan Am Fed Cup in the wake of the September 11th attacks but has fared very well in previous editions of the event.

A solid team performance is very important in this year's competition, both as a rebuilding step after the sub-par American performance at the 2001 World Team Championships in Melbourne last October, where the team placed a disappointing 19th among 24 total entries, and, more tangibly, because the results in this event are expected to significantly influence the seedings for the much more prestigious 2003 Pan American Games in the Dominican Republic and even for the subsequent World Team Championships in Finland later that year.

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