(updated 11-apr-09 5:59 )  

Rochester finished third, Yale Fourth

The US college squash organization today issued the final men's rankings for the 2009 season (which ended five weeks ago). The delay in issueing the rankings was partly attributable to some debate over the role of the national team tournament in the final rankings.

The national team tournament — where a high level of engineering of the placement of the teams in the draws removes much of the possible drama of the event — this year had some unexpected turbulence in the "first division" (the National Championship division), where the University of Rochester scored a dramatic win over Yale to secure a top-four tournament finish and then consolidated that win with a victory over Harvard in the 3/4 match.

However, since Harvard did not meet Yale in the tournament, regular season results prevailed, with Yale achieving a number-four national finish and Harvard slotting in behind them at number five. Yale coach Dave Talbott had, several weeks ago, characteristically downplayed the rankings discussion. "It doesn't really matter to us," Talbott told SquashTalk, "We know we had an excellent season. We had a terrific match with Rochester. It was a wonderful cleanly played match and they won fairly in an exciting finish. We had a good season and are satisified with that."

For Harvard, it is more of a blow to finish fifth. Harvard finished third in 06-07 and fourth in 07-08. Historical records are incomplete on this matter, but their fifth place finish may represent the lowest ever finish nationally for the Harvard men's program.

There were several other notable results. F&M had a terrific season, finishing 12th. They were 16th the previous season. Also advancing year-on-year were St Lawrence, at 15th, Colby, moving up six places to 19th. Georgetown, moving from 41st to 26th.

Teams losing ground in 2008-2009 included Vassar, dropping a precipitous 11 positions to 43rd and Bowdoin dropping from 13th to 18th.

2008-09	Final USA Men's Team Ranking
1	Trinity
2	Princeton
3	Rochester
4	Yale
5	Harvard
6	Cornell
7	Penn
8	Dartmouth
9	UWO
10	Williams
11	Bates
12	F&M
13	Brown
14	Navy
15	St Lawrence
16	Amherst
17	Middlebury
18	Bowdoin
19	Colby
20	Tufts
21	Hamilton
22	Denison
23	GWU
24	Northeastern
25	Conn
26	Northwestern
27	Stanford
28	Hobart
29	Georgetown
30	Wesleyan
31	Colgate
32	Virginia
33	Drexel
34	MIT
35	Vanderbilt
36	USC
37	Cal
38	Haverford
39	Columbia
40	PSU
41	Kenyon
42	Purdue
43	Vassar
44	Fordham
45	Boston University
46	North Carolina
47	Washington
48	Vermont
49	Lafayette
50	Notre Dame
51	Bard
52	Bryant
53	Illinois
54	Swarthmore
55	Bucknell
56	Siena

 

 

 

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