3 Tourneys Punctuate Feb 24th in USA Squash

February 24 - [NISRA College draw and Results]

Big Weekend: Waite Goes For "Double" Today, While Trinity Seeks Fourth Straight Potter Trophy

This will be a big squash day along the northeastern corridor, as three major tournaments reach their culmination.

ISDA superstar Gary Waite will be attempting a unique squash "double" when he tries to win both the USSRA Hardball Championships final against Marty Clark and (with partner Damien Mudge) his semi-final and final rounds in the Johnson Memorial ISDA tour stop in Brooklyn Heights, while several states north, Waite's alma mater, Harvard, hosts the final round of the NISRA Intercollegiate Nine-Man Team Championships and the top-seeded Trinity Bantams will try to accomplish something that has emphatically NOT been unique for them, namely defend the Art Potter Trophy that they have already won each of the past three years.

TRINITY FAVORED OVER PRINCETON IN COLLEGE TEAM NATIONALS FINAL
Trinity has rampaged through the regular season, going 16-0, winning their fifth straight NISRA title and along the way dropping only two of their 144 total team matches, one each to Harvard and Princeton. The Crimson have endured one of the most difficult and sadness-filled seasons in that program's illustrious history, finishing an all-time-low fourth (behind Trinity, Princeton and Yale) and losing captain Pete Karlen, the team's heart and soul, to midseason injuries first to his foot and later to his left eye.

In the past 10 days, legendary Harvard coach Jack Barnaby, undoubtedly the greatest college coach in squash history, under whose guidance the school won 17 Intercollegiate championships during his glorious 44-year run from 1932-36 at the Crimson helm, passed away in his home near Cambridge at the age of 92.

Then just a few days before the start of this Potter competition, Harvard suffered a 6-3 loss in New Haven to Yale, whom Harvard had previously defeated 11 straight times and in 39 of the 40 matches between these rivals since 1961.

Harvard also lost two weeks ago on their home Murr Center courts 5-4 to Ivy League champion and second seed Princeton, which in early February had defeated Yale by the same tight margin. That latter victory had occurred at Jadwin Gymnasium in northern New Jersey, where the Tiger triumph had benefited in no small measure from their vocal and multitudinous hometown fans (who, mysteriously, failed to show later that month when Princeton unsuccessfully battled Trinity for the NISRA title).

Especially in view of the several rallies and five-gamers (notably Eric Pearson's win over Yalie Chris Olsen at the No. 5 slot) without which the Tigers would have fallen, it was felt coming into the Princeton-Yale rematch yesterday afternoon in the semi-final round of the Potter weekend that the advantage the Bulldogs clearly enjoyed in team depth, which had enabled Coach Dave Talbott's crew to sweep the Nos. 6-9 positions, might well carry the day on this neutral site.

But Princeton once again nullified Yale's domination of the bottom of the line-up by again sweeping the top five, with No. 5 Tiger Eric Pearson winning easily this time. The Tiger top five of Will Evans, defending NISRA singles champ David Yik, Danny Rutherford, captain Peter Kelly and Pearson is the best in school history, according to Bob Callahan, who is completing his 21st season as Princeton head coach, and the only fairly close match this group (all juniors save Rutherford) encountered yesterday was Evans's four-gamer at No. 1 with Yale's talented sophomore Anschul Manchanda.

In the balancing semi, Harvard played Trinity much tougher than the 8-1 official tally, but only Michael Blumberg was able to break through, in a tiring five games at No. 3 with Bantam senior co-captain Lefika Ragontse, a battle whose attritional nature is causing head coach Paul Assaiante some concern for today's 1:45 p.m. final with Princeton, whose No. 3 Rutherford has split his two previous meetings with Ragontse this season.

JOHNSON DOUBLES
While the top college teams were thus sustaining their pre-tournament seedings, the ISDA pros were doing exactly the same in the cozy confines of Heights Casino, whose fabled doubles court requires almost as much sure-footedness to enter a it does to successfully play on, since it can only be accessed by descending a dark and narrow flight of stairs and then carefully maneuvering oneself through a low and narrow door located in the left side wall.

The top eight seeds all made it to the quarters and the top four seeds all will be playing in this morning's semis (at 9 and 11 a.m.), with the final scheduled for 4 o'clock this afternoon. Waite and Mudge, winners of all eight ISDA ranking events this season and 21 of the 22 tournaments they have entered since their extraordinarily productive alliance began in the spring of 1999, didn't drop a game in their pair of pre-semi wins Friday night and Saturday morning over first qualifiers Matt Churchill and Ben Gould and then Josh MacDonald and Jamie Bentley, who were played their first ranking ISDA event this season after winning the non-ranking Philadelphia Elite tourney two weeks earlier at the Cynwyd Club.

Waite and Mudge won the Johnson in 2000 but last year Mudge was sidelined with a fluke but severe left wrist injury he incurred while roller-blading on a Manhattan sidewalk and Waite and his substitute partner Mark Talbott, with whom he had won approximately 40 tournaments during Gary's pre-Mudge days in the late 1990's, lost in four to eventual surprise champions Viktor Berg and Mike Pirnak, immediately following which the great singles and doubles champion Talbott, undoubtedly the greatest American singles player in history, announced his retirement.

If Waite and Mudge defeat Clive Leach and Blair Horler (five-game quarter-final winners over Scott Butcher and Brett Martin) in today's first semi-final, Waite is guaranteed to have a chance to get back at one of the players who ousted him last year, as the other semi will pair Pirnak and Dave Kay (who beat Jeff Mulligan and Todd Binns in three) against Willie Hosey and Berg.

This latter duo, second-seeded by virtue of their quartet of 2001-2002 silver medals (in Denver, Greenwich, Wilmington and Boston), were down two games to one in their opening-round battle with Tom Harrity and Heights Casino member Eric Vlcek, who reached the final of the Cynwyd event and seemingly were on the verge of a big win here before Vlcek's legs began cramping in the fifth game and another patented fifth-game Berg hot streak enabled his team to escape with a 15-10 victory.

NATIONAL HARDBALL
The length and late ending (after 10 p.m.) of this Friday night match probably played at least some role in Harrity's subpar performance the next morning at the Harvard Club of New York, where he lost in a convincing four to Marty Clark in the first round of the Open Division of the National Hardball Championships, which he had won two years ago and where he had been runner-up on four occasions ('96, '98, '99 and '01).

Clark, who has won four National Softball championships ('95, '97, '98, '00) but never previously advanced past the semis of the Hardball event, then defeated four-time and defending champ Rob Hill in a contentious four games following Hill's opener, also a four-gamer, with '95 New York State finalist Rick Wahlstedt.

The most exciting match of this star-filled seven-man event came in a torrid Friday night quarter-final match at the Yale Club, when Rob Dinerman, a 16-time winner of the host club's annual championship, took on Mulligan, one of the hardest hitters on the ISDA circuit and a former racquetball stand-out who had won their one previous encounter in last spring's Hamil Cup, a hardball event held on the main exhibition softball court of the University Club, ten blocks northwest of the active gallery court at the Yale Club where this rematch occurred.

Except for a late-game Mulligan lapse which enabled Dinerman to make off with that game, the match was a gripping airtight battle between Mulligan's overwhelming slugging and Dinerman's savvy and placement that consumed 70 exciting minutes and an intensity level that lasted all the way through Dinerman's eventual 15-13, 14-15, 15-8 15-11 (from 10-all) victory, in the immediate aftermath of which Mulligan ruefully commented that he had been "old-schooled" by his opponent's front-court shot selection. This trait availed the winner naught in the first two games of his semi yesterday afternoon with the top-seeded Waite, who powered his way to a pair of 15-5 stanzas before letting up considerably and leaving Dinerman with a series of open balls, which the latter was able to punch away for winners and a 15-8 third. The final fourth came down to a single point, though unquestionably Waite would have cranked it up again and regained his early-match dominance in the fifth game had there been one.

Waite's Sunday schedule will require him to sandwich a noon singles final with Clark between semi-final and final-round doubles matches in Brooklyn, and there seems little doubt of his ability to meet this formidable tripartite challenge, just as the four Trinity seniors(Ragontse, Rohan Bhappu and Rohan and Gaurav Juneja) appear perfectly positioned to end their four-year Bantam careers without suffering a single team defeat. Stay tuned.

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