Taufique & Tandon Spur Formation of New CSA Team

A new era began on a winning note earlier this month when the first-ever Columbia women's squash team traveled up to Northeastern and came away with a 6-3 victory, dropping not a single game in their six match wins. Columbia has had a men's team for several decades, but there had never been a women's squad prior to this season.

That a women's team exists at all is largely due to the efforts of sophomore co-captains Zahrah Taufique, a former captain of her high-school rugby team in Hong Kong, and Olivia Tandon, Columbia's No. 1 player, who was a four-year member of the varsity at Winsor School, a prep school located in Massachusetts. Determined to continue her squash career when she arrived on Columbia's campus in autumn of 2005, even in the absence of a women's program, Tandon practiced with the men's team (which at the time was coached by former Trinity all-American Michael Ferreira) during the first part of last year, while she and Taufique quietly assembled a core group of a half-dozen players, several of whom had played the game in high school.

This small but enthusiastic group was coached during the second semester by former all-American Colby Hall, who is pursuing a graduate degree in teaching at Columbia and who had starred on several Harvard national-champion squads, serving as co-captain of the Ivy League champion 2002 Crimson contingent her senior year. Under Hall's guidance, and with the enthusiastic support of men's team captain Bobby Ghosh, the team grew in number and playing skill, to the point that the University formally approved a petition that was tendered last spring by Tandon, Taufique and another captain, Nora McLaughlin, for the creation of a recognized women's club team to represent Columbia in intercollegiate competition beginning with the current 2006-07 season.

Things moved quickly from there, with nearly a dozen team members (including returnees Liz Radin, Masha Ooyevaar and Yazzy Koukaz and incoming freshmen and former prep-school squash letter-winners Sara Hershman and Monica Gorman) now preparing for a schedule that already includes dual meets against Wellesley and Penn and round-robins at Haverford and Vassar during the next few months, with a number of additional tournaments and meets awaiting confirmation.

Columbia's gymnasium presently only has hardball courts, but Tandon and Taufique are in the process of arranging practice time at several clubs in Manhattan and hope to set up a more permanent practice venue closer to campus when the youth-enrichment organization StreetSquash (which for the past few years has been conducting practice sessions at Columbia) constructs a major squash complex near Morningside Heights in the next few years.

Hall, who played such an important role in getting the women's program started last winter, is too immersed in her graduate-studies pursuits to have time to coach the women's team this season, but Tandon has already posted an advertisement for this coaching position in the Jobs Exchange section of squashtalk.com (interested applicants should send a resume and letter of application to columbia.squash@gmail.com).

College Squash Association (CSA) Executive Director Ron Beck says he is delighted that Columbia, which for many years has been the only Ivy League school without a women's squash team, will now become a part of the growing and flourishing college schedule. Tandon and Taufique are proceeding at a prudent pace (they declined the invitation to participate in the recent Ivy Scrimmage out of a realization that their fledgling squad isn't yet ready to take on that level of competition) but they clearly have ambitious plans for the coming years, which include making Columbia women's squash an official varsity sport and eventually becoming a contending team that climbs the CSA rankings into the top tier of college women's squash.