U.S. Men's Junior Team Ready To Take On The World(s)
Aug 7, 2004, By Rob Dinerman; SquashTalk Independent News Service © 2004

The 2004 U. S. Men's Junior team, composed of current USSRA Under-19 champion Chris Gordon, Harvard sophomore Garnett Booth, two-time USSRA junior age-group winner Joe Raho and Penn freshman Suleyman Saleem, will fly this Wednesday evening from JFK Airport to Islamabad, Pakistan (with a brief stopover in London) to compete in the 13th World Junior Championships, a prestigious biennial tournament whose individual flight will run from August 17th-22nd followed by the team event from August 23rd-28th.

Head coach Michael Calloway, assistant coach and former Hobart standout
Chris Smith, a four-year veteran of the highly successful Squashbusters
organization, and team manager Vijay Chitnis, who was recently appointed USSRA
Director Of Junior Development after a praiseworthy two-year stint as the head
coach at St. Lawrence, will be aiming to surpass the 8th-place standing attained
in Chennai, India, by the 2002 team, on which Gordon played and which was led
by Julian Illingworth and Will Broadbent, the current Yale and Harvard No. 1's
respectively.

Part of their optimism stems from the strong showing of several squad
members this past month at the Pioneer German and Dutch Opens, which were held
in Cologne and Amsterdam respectively, and in which many of the top world
junior players participated. Gordon and Booth, who are clearly the top two players
on the team, also played this past winter in the British and Scottish Opens,
so this year's team has more than its share of recent high-level international
experience, always an important element in an event such as the Worlds.
Gordon, a 9/16 seed slated to play the No. 3 seed in the Individuals quarters if
they both get that far, recently won a round in the qualifying of a PSA pro
event, while Booth, after missing most of the early portion of the 2003-04 CSA
intercollegiate season with a leg injury, played a major role down the stretch
drive of Harvard's run to the Ivy League title and a near-miss bid to unseat
Trinity College for the national championship, which the Bantams barely won via a
5-4 Potter Cup final.

The Americans hope that the 4-5 days between their arrival in Pakistan
and the beginning of the individual draw will be sufficient to allow them both
to rid themselves of the jet lag that inevitably accompanies a journey of such
magnitude and to acclimatize themselves to the several thousand feet of
altitude and what are expected to be extremely hot and humid playing conditions.
This latter task should be facilitated by the fact that the tournament will be
played in a brand-new (and hence presumably air-conditioned) club, fortuitously
located on the grounds of the Pakistan Air Force base.

This latter situation, as well as a myriad of other security precautions
that have been taken by the host country, should hopefully ensure a safe and
smooth event even in these troubled times in that region of the world. The
Pakistan national squash association has taken steps to make sure that the hotel
floors on which the U. S. and other teams are staying will be heavily secured,
and the American team fully plans to "stay close to home" and to limit their
travel to between the hotel and the playing arena.

The USSRA as well as many other countries are constantly monitoring the
situation in and around Islamabad, as is the World Squash Federation under
whose umbrella these Championships are run, and there was a fair amount of
back-and-forth during these past months among the major figures involved with Team USA as to the advisability of sending a team under the current circumstances.
The families of several prospective American team members were alarmed enough
about the safety issues to decline an opportunity to attend the team try-outs,
but in the end the U. S., as well as 21 other team entries from around the
world, have decided to participate.

In a brief interview this weekend, Smith emphasized how much support the
team has gotten from coaches, USSRA officers and the entire American junior
squash community for the trip. Fundraising efforts continue even now in an
attempt to cover the costs of the trip, and anyone interested in contributing can
access donation information (including online donations) on the team web site
(server2000.net/a003sp4), which will also be supplying daily updates on the
team's performance and results, as, of course, will Squashtalk.com. People can
also sign up on the web site to receive daily emails from the team from Pakistan.

Countries such as England, India and Australia have always provided
formidable competition during the quarter-century history of this championship, but
Smith and the other team officials nevertheless believe that this American
line-up has the talent, experience and potential to improve dramatically on past
U. S. showings in this event.

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