Yale Squash Player Attacked In New Year's Eve Party Brawl

Squashtalk has learned that Yale freshman and varsity squash team member Sharyar Aziz Jr., whose father played on the Yale varsity in the early 1970's and is the current Treasurer of the Skillman Associates (the Friends Of Yale Squash), sustained a broken jaw and other injuries when he and fellow members of the Baker's Dozen, an all-male Yale capella singing group, were attacked by a gang of thugs after leaving a New Year's Eve party in San Francisco while the group was having its annual holiday-break California tour.

Aziz, whose jaw was broken in two places, underwent surgery after flying back to New York, where his family lives. He is expected to make a full recovery, but his jaw is permanently fitted with titanium and will be wired shut for eight weeks, limiting him during that period to a liquid diet and preventing him from returning to either the squash team or the Baker's Dozen for the remainder of the current season. Several other members of the group incurred serious injuries as well, including concussions, black eyes and other significant bodily injuries as the result of an episode that Yale College Dean termed "shocking and appalling" and that Leigh Whitney, the Aziz family lawyer, strongly believes should result in arrests in the near future and the filing of multiple felony charges.

Ironically, the party the group was attending was given to honor them after a performance earlier that evening, but several uninvited guests first harassed the singers and then used a cell-phone to contact a large band of their buddies, who laid in wait outside and attacked the singers when they exited the house shortly after midnight. It appears that inter-school rivalry between two prep schools (St. Ignatius and Sacred Heart) played a role in the episode (two current St. Ignatius students were hosting the party, which was infiltrated by a pair of Sacred Heart alumni, who crudely insulted the singers, thereby starting the entire incident), which has also now erupted into what a police spokesman termed "a wildfire with rumors and innuendoes" in the wake of the recent disclosure that some of the suspects (who were taken into custody but then released without any charges being filed) are the sons of a prominent and influential area pediatrician who have a local reputation for violence.

According to junior Dan Toubolets, the Baker's Dozen winter tour manager, the tour of California will complete its schedule until its planned January 14th return to New Haven. The Yale men's squash team co-won the 2006 Ivy League title along with Princeton and Harvard, but, in the wake of the graduation last spring of '05 and '06 S. L. Green champion Julian Illingworth and three of his classmates, the current squad has struggled out of the gate, losing to Penn 5-4 last month in its first important meet of the 2006-07 season.