Synchronicity: The Parallel Yale Careers of Illingworth and Quibell

Michelle Quibell.photo © 2006 Debra Tessier.

Both were multiple age-group junior champions who entered Yale concurrently in the fall of 2002, rarely lost in intercollegiate competition,
led their respective teams to major accomplishments and capped their careers off with sterling results in last weekend's US National Championships, marking their final appearances on their home courts at the Bradey Squash Center.

Michelle Quibell and Julian Illingworth were totally different individuals,
and were surrounded by different supporting casts, yet they emerged together certainly as the best man-woman duo in Yale squash history.

It didn't start out that way. Both came in as highly heralded freshman who
however in the climactic matches of their freshman seasons three years ago each squandered leads and lost the deciding matches in 5-4 defeats to Ivy League rivals, in each case with the League championship at stake. Illingworth led Yasser El-Halaby 2-0, 8-3 (match-ball) in the '03 Yale-Princeton meet that ultimately decided the Ivy League title that season before the latter rallied to give the Tigers a 5-4 team win; three weeks later, also with the supremacy in the Ivies at stake, Quibell captured the first game of her match against
Harvard's Louisa Hall and led late in the fourth but Hall rescued that game in a
tiebreaker to seal Harvard's 5-4 win that year.

More recently, both were derailed as seniors by late-February maladies that contributed to disappointing individual and team home losses to underdog Harvard (in each case with Ivy League title ramifications) and to quarterfinal defeats in the Intercollegiate Individuals a few weeks later.

But this past weekend, both rebounded with remarkable performances, in each
case keyed by decisive upset semifinal victories on their "home" Yale turf over the higher-seeded Quick siblings, Preston and Meredeth, to close out their Eli careers in glorious fashion and consolidate their status in each case as unquestionably the greatest male and female squash players respectively in Yale history.

GREAT U.S. NATIONALS WEEKEND

Julian Illingworth .photo © 2006 Debra Tessier.

Sunday afternoon Julian Illingworth successfully defended the S. L. Green title he won a year ago in Boston with a convincing 3-0 final-round victory over
Damian Walker, who the last time this event was hosted by Yale's Brady Squash Center in 2002, when Illingworth and Michelle Quibell were high-school
seniors, had his own successful defense of the S. L. Green crown. One day earlier,

Quibell had nearly prevented Latasha Khan from winning her fifth consecutive women's national title before dropping a hard-fought 9-7 in the fourth decision.

During their careers as collegians, the Yale stars evenly divided up the national-championships booty, with Illingworth winning two U.S. National championships and getting to one Intercollegiate Individual final (his junior season, in '05, when Princeton's Yasser El-Halaby took the third of his unprecedented four men's Individuals) and Quibell capturing two women's college Individuals and reaching one U. S. National final.

TWO CONSECUTIVE IVY CHAMPIONSHIPS
Michelle Quibell was surrounded by a much stronger cast of characters to
accentuate her career; she and her heralded classmate Amy Gross would be joined
their sophomore season by Catherine McLeod and Kate Rapisarda, and later by Miranda Ranieri. Those five and their increasingly deep squad would recover from that initial 2003 setback at Harvard's hands to sweep to victory in the national championship Howe Cup three
consecutive times and to the Ivy League title in both Quibell's sophomore and junior seasons.

Quibell herself would claim the Individuals in both her sophomore and junior years, dethroning '02 and '03 champion Amina Helal of Trinity in an extremely well played 3-0 win two years ago - a match much closer than the score might suggest - and solidly out-playing Kyla Grigg of Harvard in last year's final. Her squad appeared well positioned for a Howe Cup and Ivy League three-peat last month, needing a home win over Harvard to close out the regular season schedule.

Illingworth had a slightly less formidable supporting cast, especially when compared with Yale's perennial rivals Trinity, Princeton and Harvard, and therefore only collected the one co-Ivy championship this senior year. As well, in a men's league dominated by a diversity of foreign stars on the Trinity, Princeton, and Crimson squads, Illingworth had a fight on his hands simply in reaching the late rounds of the Collegiate Individual Championships.

Back to the scenario three weeks ago.
But Illingworth and his quartet of '06 classmates seemed set for their first outright Ivy League title (and Yale's first in 16 years), which they could clinch with a win over Harvard the week after last month's men's team nationals.

Early that week, however, Quibell was beset with the flu, and still struggling with a balky ankle, and Illingworth pulled a leg muscle in practice. Both lost their matches to their respective Harvard counterparts Siddharthe Suchde and Lily Lorentzen, and both Harvard teams prevailed overall, giving Harvard the women's Ivy League title outright and forcing a three-way tie between Yale, Harvard and Princeton in the men's Ivy League standings.

Few of the spectators who somberly exited the Brady Squash Center that evening of February 22nd in the wake of the disappointing ending to Illingworth's and Quibell's home Eli collegiate careers could have envisioned the turnaround that awaited this pair in the same building less than a month later.

Julian Illingworth .photo © 2006 Debra Tessier.

BIG WIN OVER MEREDETH
But by this past weekend, both Yalies had recovered both their health and their form, and they soared into their respective U. S. Championship finals, Quibell with solid victories over '98 Intercollegiate Individual winner Ivy Pochoda and three-time ('02, '04 and '05) Nationals runner-up Meredeth Quick, and Illingworth with a 3-1 quarter over Penn standout Gilly Lane and a surprisingly abrupt 3-0 semi over '03 and '04 S. L. Green champ Preston Quick.
Ironically, and proof of how swiftly the squash time-cycle turns, the Quicks had had their own "coming out" party in this same building four years ago, when each had unexpectedly attained the finals before falling there to Walker and Khan respectively.Walker had won that '02 event (in which Illingworth had competed) without dropping a single game but in his '06 return to New Haven he proved no match for Illingworth's youth, firepower and momentum.

The two Yale stars have formed the best pair of college man/woman classmates at least since the Princeton '89 duo of Jeff Stanley (two college individual crowns, the men's Nationals as a sophomore) and Demer Holleran (winner of the college Individuals three of her four years) and it seems an appropriate coincidence that Princeton provided the venue for the U. S. Nationals their senior years and therefore served as the site of the first of Holleran's six consecutive championships to conclude her own extraordinary college career 17 years ago.