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15 Vye for Pan Am Slots
Rob Dinerman © 2002 SquashTalk; all rights of reproduction reserved.
June 27, 2003      

Jamie Crombie Photo © Debra Tessier 2003

The men's and women's U. S. Team Trials will take place at the St. George School just outside of Newport, Rhode Island from Friday through Monday, with the top players vying for the three available slots on the America teams that will compete in the Pan American Games.

This prestigious quadrennial two-week competition will be hosted by the Dominican Republic in late August and will include squash for only the second time. The formula to determine the composition of the teams will be based 40% on the end-of-season rankings
calculated from the U. S. Team Selection events this past winter and spring,
another 20% on the S. L. Green results at Trinity College in March and the last
40% on performance in the upcoming Trials themselves.

The original plan had been to have eight participants in both the men's and women's trials and to have two four-player pools in each case. The men will proceed on this basis, but the withdrawal two and a half weeks ago of Julia Beaver for medical reasons leaves only seven women entrants, since no one else played in enough of the required tournaments to be eligible to try out for the team.

Beaver, a U. S. team member in last year's Pan Am Federation Cup and World Team Championships, was ranked No. 2 after a strong recent season highlighted by her victory in the Westchester Squash tourney and final-round showing in Utah, where she lost in a close five games to reigning U. S. National champion and No. 1 ranked Latasha Khan.

Her unfortunate withdrawal deprives the women's team of a potentially significant contributor and has resulted in a full round-robin format in which each player will have six matches in what promises to be a hectic four-day schedule in which staying power and freedom from injuries may prove as important a set of factors as proficiency. Trailing Khan in the rankings are, in order, 2002 S. L. Green finalist Meredeth Quick, 2003 Harvard Club Invitational winner Louisa Hall, 2001 National champion Shabana Khan, Latasha's older sister and her co-finalist in the 2003 Nationals, Hope Prockop, Yale freshman sensation Michelle Quibell, the only current college undergraduate other than Hall, and recent Harvard stand-out Carlin Wing, whose game has improved greatly over the past year while she has been based in Amsterdam.

The men's rankings are led by 2001 and 2002 U. S. Team No. 1 player and S. L. Green champion Damian Walker, followed by just-crowned U. S. Pro champion Jamie Crombie, a veteran of several Canadian national squads, current S. L. Green champion Preston Quick, three-time S. L. Green finalist Richard Chin, 2002 Trinity College Invitational finalist Tim Wyant, Yale freshman star Julian Illingworth, recent Dartmouth all-American Beau River and 2003 Harvard captain Dylan Patterson. They will be going at a more manageable one match per day, but with Walker, Crombie and Quick all filling the top three on both the end-of-season and S. L. Green rankings, it will take both a substantial collapse by one of them and a major breakthrough performance by someone in the bottom five for the team to be comprised by anyone outside of this trio.

Squashtalk will provide day-to-day coverage of the trials as well as a wrap-up report early next week following their conclusion.

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