Excerpts from A History Of Harvard Squash During The Mike Way Coaching Era (2010-2021)
The Home Stretch Of The Men’s 2012-13 Season
By the time the Elis arrived at the Barnaby Courts
six days later, it was known that whichever team won would thereby
finish in a first-place tie with Princeton for the Ivy League title
since a few days earlier the Tigers had lost 5-4 to Cornell. The
evening began with a tribute to seniors Scherl, Michas, Ma,
Cabot and McKean, who were saluted for the dedication and work ethic
they had demonstrated throughout their college careers. When play
began, Harvard got wins during the first two shifts from freshman Matt
Roberts over Yale No. 9 Joey Roberts (no relation), McLaughlin over
Bulldog captain Hywel Robinson and Koh, who battled Yale No. 3 Richard
Dodd on even terms through four games and then astonishingly won the
fifth 11-0.
Michas, who had heretofore gone undefeated
throughout the season while recording significant wins over Penn’s
Tyler Odell, Princeton’s David Hoffman and Trinity’s Moustafa Hamada,
took a two games to one lead over Yale No. 8 Charlie Wyatt. Though
forced to deal with lower-back problems dating back to the beginning of
his sophomore year, Michas had learned to adapt to this situation well
enough by his senior year to have become one of the most dependable
members on the team. But he suffered a severe pull of his right
hamstring at the very end of the third game, rendering him practically
immobile through the final two games (both of which he lost 11-4) and
sidelining him for the remainder of the season, a disappointing ending
for this two-time captain whose passion and leadership skills made him
a favorite of both his teammates and coach. With the two teams tied at
3-3 going into the final shift, Farag held Yale No. 1 Kenny Chan to 10
total points and Scherl then sealed the team outcome with a
praiseworthy four-game win over Yale No. 7 Eric Caine, following which
Power made the final score 6-3 by rallying past Yale No. 2 Neil Martin,
11-6 in the fifth.
It was the first time that Harvard’s men’s team had won at least
a share of the Ivy League pennant since 2006, and when the Potter Cup
competition began at Yale five days later, the same three Harvard
players --- Farag, Power and Scherl --- who had finished off the
Bulldogs similarly broke a 3-3 tie by sweeping their matches against
Rochester. Waiting for the Crimson in the semis were the defending
Potter Cup champion Tigers, whose revered Coach Bob Callahan had been
diagnosed with a lethal form of brain cancer the previous spring and
was known to be in his final season as Princeton’s coach. As noted,
each of the last two times these teams had met, Princeton had won 5-4,
and right from the outset, after the Tigers had had an emotional team
meeting in Callahan’s hotel room the previous evening, this battle also
seemed destined for a 5-4 conclusion in one direction or another.
Princeton held a 2-1 lead after the opening shift, but Harvard swept
the second shift, with Roberts eking out a 17-15 win in the
fourth and final game of his match with Hoffman and McLaughlin coming
up with a magnificent 11-6, 16-14, 11-6 win over Princeton No. 2 Samuel
Kang.
With four matches in the books and the heretofore
invincible Farag about to step on court to seal the deal, Harvard
appeared to be fully in the driver’s seat. But, remarkably, Todd
Harrity responded to the exigencies of the moment with the best
performance of his career, winning in an airtight four games by a score
of 11-8, 9-11, 11-8, 11-9. “I really enjoy playing him,” Harrity said
after his reflex forehand volley to perfect length down the right wall
that ended a long all-court exchange at match ball had put an
exclamation point on the upset. “It was a big accomplishment for me
because I’ve never beaten him before. Last time we played, even though
I got a game, I felt like he was a level above me. So I feel like I
kind of proved myself and proved that I’m on that level.” His teammate
Dylan Ward said about Harrity’s win, “Todd had talked to me about how
much this meant to him. It’s his last tournament, his last big event as
a squash player in college, and he really wanted to go out showing that
he was, and is, Number One, and he could go out with a big win for the
team.” Harrity’s co-captain and fellow Philadelphian Harrington, who
had been playing with Harrity ever since the pair opposed each other in
the final round of the 2003 U. S. Under-13’s 10 years earlier, later
said that he never felt more proud of Harrity than he did watching the
unbelievably high-quality match with Farag that day.
POWER PLAY
When Harrity finished off his landmark win and Princeton
No. 7 Vivek Dinodia then beat Scherl 3-0, it tied the team score
at 4-all, leaving the outcome to the No. 4 match between Power and
Ward. By that stage, Princeton had during the past 18 months won so
many airtight dual meets with clutch performances --- especially by
Ward, who had won the deciding match against Harvard in both the 2012
and 2013 dual meets and who also, as mentioned, had contributed a
crucial last-shift win in the 2012 Potter Cup final --- that it almost
seemed ordained that the Tigers would pull this one out as well and
reach the Potter Cup final for a second straight year and sixth time in
eight years. Ward knew before the meet even began that he might well be
playing the deciding match yet again. “It’s been interesting playing
that role on the team, and I guess I’ve sort of embraced it recently,”
he said earlier in the day. He took the first game 11-6 and seemed to
have taken a commanding lead after also winning the second 12-10. The
Princeton players, who knew how talented and determined Power was but
also had great confidence in Ward’s competitive spirit, were hanging on
every point and could almost taste the victory.
The court was very hot and both players were
hitting the ball deep and rarely going for shots. Both had been
exceptional cross-country runners in high school, and both had become
successful college players primarily by imposing their game and wearing
opponents down. There were dozens of lets and a number of arguments
with the referee. There was increasingly little shot-making as the two
players battled in close quarters to the bitter end, mostly on the left
wall, where every inch of court was severely contested. Ward later said
the match, which lasted just over two torturous hours, had the feel of
a marathon that might never end, and the score seesawed along very
slowly.
For Farag, who was heartsick at the thought that he had
failed to come through when his team was on the verge of reaching its
first Potter Cup final in the eight years since Harvard had last done
so in 2005, it definitely felt like a marathon that would never end,
and he later described the time that elapsed between the end of his
match and the end of the Power/Ward match as the longest 50 minutes of
his life. The difference between the two players was almost
indecipherable, just an extra tin or an extra nick, usually at the end
of a lengthy and brutal exchange. Ultimately Power was able to
gradually but inexorably assert himself, winning each of the last three
games 11-7 to seal Harvard’s advance to the final as the Princeton
players watched in dismay from their vantage point just behind the
court’s glass back wall. When the final ball (a shallow forehand
cross-court winner off Power’s racquet that nicked on the left wall in
front of Ward) had been struck, most of the Harvard players ran onto
the court to embrace Power, but Farag, exhausted more emotionally from
his time trembling in the gallery than physically by his match with
Harrity, didn’t even have the energy to join them.
Afterwards, Coach Way was effusive when asked about Power’s
comeback. “I’ve only been here three seasons but that was the biggest
moment I’ve ever seen,” he declared. “That moment will never be
forgotten. Farag had taken a big loss and our captain (i.e. Michas) was
out with an injury, and so at that time we were not looking good at
all. For Gary to come out and do what he did was absolutely heroic.
He’s probably the fittest guy in college squash. There’s nobody more
determined, and if you put determination in a beast like that, you’re
going to get something quite awesome. You have to have intense
concentration to do it for that long, since many rallies were 60 to 80
shots and the concentration has to be there.”
Several players chimed in on Power’s win as well,
describing him as “the kind of player who you know will never give up
and you always want playing in the last match that you can count on to
pull through,” according to freshman Jake Matthews. Mullaney, who had
risen to the No. 6 spot by that stage of the season, echoed Matthews’s
point when he said that, “If there is one guy on our team whom we would
want to be playing the last match on court, it would be Gary.” Power
himself said that he was “just trying to get back and push us into the
final. With so many other people riding on it, I was keeping my head in
the game and trying to focus on my next swing. That helped more than
anything else.”Astonishingly, of the 10 Harvard players who competed in
that semifinal (including No. 10 Samuel Goldberg, who beat Princeton’s
Ash Egan after losing to him in the dual meet), no fewer than eight ---
Farag, McLaughlin, Power, Olson, Mullaney, Scherl, Roberts and Goldberg
--- had a reversed won-lost result that day from what had happened in
the dual meet.
Even after such a rollercoaster semifinal, the Crimson got off
to a great start in the Sunday summit against Trinity by taking two of
the three matches in the opening shift. Ma, capping off an undefeated
weekend throughout which he had responded brilliantly to the challenge
of moving into the starting nine due to Michas’s injury, defeated
Trinity No. 9 Matt Mackin in four games, finishing Mackin off with a
flourish when he smashed a forehand that rolled out of the front-left
nick. One of Trinity’s mottoes throughout their decade-and-a-half-long
domination of college squash had been “We win at No. 9,” which indeed
had been the case in all but two of its past 14 consecutive Potter Cup
finals (the exceptions having occurred in 2009 and 2011) prior to what
Ma accomplished. Though somewhat inconsistent during much of his
college career, Ma came up big in this tournament, and afterwards he
expressed his gratitude at having been allowed to be part of the
Harvard squash tradition and to all the former Harvard players who had
traveled to New Haven to support the team. “It meant a lot to be
trusted by my teammates and go up and represent Harvard in such an
important match and by all the alums who haven’t been in that place in
so long,” he said. “Harvard has a rich tradition in squash and as a
senior I made it my goal to reward everyone for their hard work.”
In the other two first-shift matches, Mullaney, who
had nearly beaten Detter (before losing the fifth game 12-10) in the
dual meet, this time lost to him in four games, but at No. 3, Koh,
trailing Miled Zarazua 10-8 in the fifth game, ran off four straight
points. In what was later universally deemed the defining match of the
day, McLaughlin, who had played brilliantly the day before against Kang
and had been a five-game winner over Trinity No. 2 Juan Vargas in the
dual meet between these schools two weeks earlier, took the first game
of their rematch and led 8-4 in the second. At that juncture, the
mathematics of the competitive terrain appeared to be closing in on the
Trinity camp. With two points already on the Harvard ledger and Farag a
sure bet to win his third-shift match with Bantam No. 1 Reinhold
Hergeth (which Farag did without yielding more than five points in any
of the three games), if McLaughlin could convert his substantial
mid-match advantage, it would have put his team in the position of
needing to win only one of the other four matches to clinch the
national championship.
A STATISTICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL BLOW
But Vargas rallied to win that game 12-10, setting off a
huge roar from the decidedly pro-Trinity crowd filled with the multiple
busloads of students who had made the convenient half-hour trip from
Hartford to New Haven. Included in the blue-and-yellow-clad sea of
Trinity sea of supporters were Vargas’s older brother Andres, a
four-year starter on championship Trinity College squash teams who at
the time was serving as the team’s assistant coach, and Raul Vargas,
their father, who had traveled to New Haven from Colombia to attend the
tournament. By winning that second game, Juan Vargas administered both
a statistical and psychological blow from which neither McLaughlin (who
then lost the next two games 11-5, 11-6) nor his teammates were able to
recover. The Bantams swept the second shift (with Kotian and Hamada
earning 3-0 wins over Olson and Roberts respectively) to go up 4-2,
then got their needed fifth point when their No. 6 player Elshorafy
duplicated his regular-season win over Scherl. In the day’s final two
matches, by which time the team outcome had been decided, Power lost,
11-8 in the fifth (after leading two games to one), to Trinity No. 4
Karan Malik and Farag, as mentioned, straight-gamed Hergeth to account
for the final 6-3 score.
Asked afterwards what enabled him to reverse the course of
a match he had been losing, even Vargas had trouble identifying a
cause. “I’m not quite sure what made me turn in that match, but I do
remember there was a click inside of me halfway through the second
game, and I suddenly started feeling confident and full of energy. The
crowd was going wild outside and I was feeding off of that. I managed
to switch my mentality and started getting on top of Brandon, becoming
more aggressive and taking the initiative of attacking while still
grinding and getting him tired from constantly being on defense. I
could see his frustration, which was unusual, as he was normally pretty
composed, and I was feeding off of that too. Once I won that second
game, I became so focused that I didn’t really notice in detail all
that was going on outside. I just remember thinking there was no way I
was going to let him win since that would mean we could lose the final
as a team. My brother’s coaching obviously helped and he knew how to
keep me calm when I was down and that was crucial too!”
“ALL IN”
A Trinity College senior named Marc DiBenedetto, who had traveled with
the team on road trips and assiduously chronicled its journey
throughout that season as part of an independent study class credit,
produced a 55-minute documentary entitled “All In,” which he presented
to Trinity’s men’s and women’s teams at the school’s Cinestudio that
spring (the film later attracted lots of viewers on Youtube). In the
credits at the end of the film, he thanked Coach Assaiante and the
entire Bantam team “for helping me pursue my passion.” Because of how
committed and involved a figure he had been --- showing up for
virtually every practice and dual meet with his omnipresent camera ---
throughout Trinity’s successful mission to regain the Potter Cup after
relinquishing it to Princeton in 2012, DiBenedetto was viewed by the
team members as one of them (“He definitely added value,” Andres Vargas
asserted) and was therefore one of the recipients when the championship
rings were handed out to the players at their end-of-season banquet.
After graduating that spring, DiBenedetto got a job at Fox
Sports in Los Angeles, where he worked for a few years before then
taking his current position with NESN, the New England Sports Network,
which covers all Boston-area sports teams. He is convinced that it was
the “All In” documentary that got him the job offer from Fox, and, when
asked about the 2013 Potter Cup final nearly a decade later, he
declared that, although in his professional career he has covered Super
Bowls, World Series games, the NCAA Basketball Tournament and a host of
other marquee sporting events, a number of which have come down to the
final play, nothing he has ever been associated with has even come
close to making him as nervous, as excited, as adrenalized or
ultimately as exhilarated as he felt that day at Yale’s overflowing
Brady Squash Center as he filmed the battle between Harvard and Trinity
College for supremacy in men’s college squash. “I think back on
making that film often,” said DiBenedetto, whose continuing loyalty to
Trinity College is fully exemplified by the fact that his year of
graduation to this day (eight years after the fact) is embedded in his
email address. “It was the starting point of my whole career and will
always mean a great deal to me.”
Farag’s post-match comments paid full respect to what Trinity
had achieved, but with a touch of defiance thrown in as well. “Trinity
is a lot better prepared than any other team,” he acknowledged. “They
took the title home, but they were more lucky and determined today. I
think it could have gone either way, but we couldn’t get the last two
matches that we needed. I have mixed feelings about today’s match. I
think the whole season we had the goal of winning and also we
persevered. This will make us nothing but stronger and harder to beat
next year. I think nobody will want to play against us next year,” he
concluded. “We were much more professional this year and we will be
even better and more professional next year.” Trinity then hosted the
Individuals, but all of its players were so spent from the effort they
had expended in regaining the Potter Cup crown that not one of them was
able to win his first-round match. The semifinals of the men’s draw
consisted of Harrity and three Egyptians, namely Farag, Khalifa, a
freshman at St. Lawrence that year, and Bates College freshman Ahmed
Abdel Khalek. Harrity’s win over Khalek was fairly straightforward, but
the Farag-Khalifa semi was a classic. The pair had been playing each
other ever since their childhood days in the very early 2000’s,
frequently in the final rounds of junior tournaments in Egypt.
When Farag won his first junior tournament in 2002, his
final-round opponent had been Khalifa, when Khalifa won his first
junior tournament shortly thereafter, his final-round opponent had been
Farag. They had been trading off ever since, with neither player
winning more than a few matches in a row before the other returned the
favor. Tragically, in one of their finals a few years after their
rivalry began, Khalifa’s father, an avid recreational squash player who
was seated in the front row, suffered a fatal heart attack right in the
middle of the match. The Farag-Khalifa match in Hartford seesawed late
into the fifth game, at which juncture Farag, leading 10-8
(double-match-ball) surrendered the next two points and wound up losing
13-11. The differing courses of the two semifinals seemed to favor
Harrity, but Khalifa was able to win the final, 11-4, 11-6, 13-11, to
become the first Individuals winner from neither the Ivy League nor
Trinity in the 24 years since Scott Dulmage of Western Ontario had won
the 1989 final over Princeton’s Jeff Stanley.
A Team Trip To Colombia in 2019
SQUASH URBANO COLOMBIA
The team drew inspiration from a number of other sources as well
throughout the fall and winter, one of which for sure was a trip that
both the men’s and women’s teams made in early January to Cartagena,
Colombia, where they spent a week at Squash Urbano Colombia, that
country’s counterpart to the Squash and Education Alliance (SEA)
organizations that had proliferated in many major American cities
during the past two decades. Its Executive Director, Esteban Espinal,
had spent a year in Toronto as a 16-year-old two decades earlier while
training under Coach Way’s aegis at the Toronto Racquet Club in
preparation to represent Colombia in the biennial World Junior
Championships in Milan in 2000. (One of his teammates in that event was
Bernardo Samper, who two years later won the 2002 Intercollegiate
Individuals as a freshman at Trinity.) Espinal then played on the
PSA tour for a few years before getting a job at CitySquash in the
Bronx from 2009-2014, where he eventually was promoted to Squash
Director. In 2014, he moved back to Colombia and launched Squash Urbano
Colombia.
He and Coach Way had kept in touch throughout that time,
and the two of them collaborated in organizing this team visit. Squash
Urbano Colombia had six singles courts and one softball doubles court.
The team trained on the courts during the morning and then coached the
kids (who ranged in age from 9 to 16) during the afternoon. There was a
roof above the courts, but they were otherwise open-air, and the
temperature became so hot and humid in midday that once Coach Way had
to call a premature halt to the practice session out of concern that
his players would become dehydrated. The courts also had to be mopped
every few hours to prevent dust from accumulating. The huge villa
(three floors and a rooftop swimming pool) where they stayed was
located close to the town square of the Old City of Cartagena, right
next-door to a very active nightclub, from which loud noises emanated
until well after midnight every night. After a mostly sleepless first
night, the team members acquired ear plugs, which enabled them to get
some sleep during the remainder of their visit.
Brownell missed the first two days of the trip since he
had received a wild-card spot into the main draw of the Tournament of
Champions, having won a tournament at Chelsea Piers a few weeks earlier
to determine which American player would get that entry. His
first-round match was played on the four-glass-wall portable court in
Grand Central Station and he was thrilled at being in such a
high-profile environment and knowing that people from all over the
world were watching his match, which was being streamed on Squash TV.
He actually won his first game against Youssef Soliman, who was ranked
just outside the top 30 in the PSA standings, before eventually losing
3-1 (in a fourth-game tiebreaker) --- but, even though by the time the
match ended it was 9pm, Brownell’s night was just beginning.
Immediately after the match ended, he had to race off to Kennedy
Airport for a post-midnight flight to Panama City and a connecting
flight from there that landed at Cartagena at 7am. He then discovered
that he had no internet capacity and did not know how to get from the
airport to the Old City.
He happened to be wearing a Red Sox baseball cap and
fortunately ran into an airport employee who followed major league
baseball, sparking a conversation --- since Spanish had been one of
Brownell’s favorite subjects in high school and he even received a
citation for his proficiency in that subject at Harvard --- that led to
the employee driving Brownell to the town square, at which point a
homeless person selling soccer jerseys was able to direct him to the
house where his teammates were eating breakfast at the time their weary
co-captain arrived. They had all watched Brownell’s Tournament of
Champions match on a large TV in the villa the night before and
complimented him on how well he had played against Soliman. Indeed,
even before Brownell boarded his flight out of JFK, his teammates had
sent him a video of them watching his match and applauding
enthusiastically after he had won the first game. It was a fortuitous
“all’s well that ends well” conclusion to a very adventurous 15 hours
that began with Brownell playing squash in one of the most prestigious
events on the PSA tour in one of the most famous buildings in America
and ended with him exhausted, dehydrated, on a different continent and
reaching his destination aided in some measure by a baseball cap and
with the final part of his guidance being provided by a homeless person
who spoke no English.
The kids at Squash Urbano Colombia were incredibly
enthusiastic and a mutual bond was very quickly and strongly
formed between themselves and the Harvard student-athletes, who even
learned some Spanish from the youngsters (a number of whom could speak
reasonably good English as well) as the week progressed. The team
members were only obligated to coach the kids for an hour or two during
the afternoons, but many of them stayed and continued their coaching
well after that time, as did Coach Way, who often was still coaching as
dusk fell. The interaction with the kids was uplifting, while also at
times being disheartening, as when one of them mentioned that two of
his older brothers had been killed in gang violence when they were
still teenagers. On one afternoon the team went on a boat trip to
Rosario Island, where the view was, according to Kennedy, “stunning.”
The boat took them close to see what had been the compound which Pablo
Escobar, the notorious drug kingpin, had used as the headquarters for
his operation. When at the suggestion of the guide, a number of the
players donned snorkeling equipment and jumped into the water, they saw
a damaged plane at the bottom, which according to the guide had been
shot down at Escobar’s behest.
News of the visit got around Cartagena so quickly that,
towards the end of the week, the local newspaper El Universal sent
several of its reporters and a cameraman to interview Way and Espinal
and write a major article about the entire expedition. There was at
least one memorable evening rooftop conditioning session that Coach Way
labeled “lung-burners,” consisting of jumps, lunges, push-ups and
sprints, very short but extremely intense, with the goal of “firing the
lungs” to recreate what the lungs go through during a grueling squash
point. Crouin also led the team in a special workout routine, which he
called “a common French strength exercise focusing on lunges and what
we call the ‘magic square’ because we imagine a tee in front of us and
work on an explosive first step in all six directions. In addition,
Alexi led a couple of plyometric and balance exercises in the mornings
to reinforce the ankles because several team members, including Alexi
himself, were dealing with minor ankle injuries at the time.”
TALISMANS
On the final day before the teams departed, the youngsters
gave bracelets with the colors of Colombia’s flag (red, yellow and
blue) to the players as a token of their appreciation, and many of the
Harvard players wore the bracelets for weeks thereafter, in some cases
right through to the end of the season, as a sort of good-luck charm
and to show solidarity with the kids they had taught. In fact, in the
trophy lineup after both the men’s and women’s teams won their
respective national team championships, a number of the players were
photographed wearing their bracelets. One of them was Kayley Leonard,
for whom the week in Cartagena was especially meaningful, both because
she had previously tutored inner-city kids at CitySquash during her
high school years, and because the visit represented a chance to
reunite and have a kind of reciprocal full-circle moment with Espinal,
since nearly a decade earlier he had actually been the coach of
Leonard’s middle school squash team at Convent of the Sacred Heart in
Greenwich, which had its practice sessions at the nearby Club 800 in
Westchester, where Espinal was based at the time. The fact that Leonard
also spoke some Spanish was part of why she was a favorite among the
Colombia kids, who gave her a pierced earring on the last day. The trip
was by all accounts incredibly culturally rewarding and one that,
according to Coach Way, “will have a lasting impact.” Amina Yousry said
that, by the time the trip ended, she thought of her teammates as part
of her family, thoughts that Sam Scherl referenced as well when he
spoke of how both teams came closer together both within each team and
between the teams during the week that they shared in that setting.
The Home Stretch Of The Women’s 2019-20 Season
20 IN 2020
It was equally meaningful for the quartet of Harvard women
seniors --- co-captains Gina Kennedy and Amelia Henley, along with
Eleonore Evans and Annika Engstrom --- to emulate what Abouaish, Hughes
and Brownell had accomplished by having a college swan-song
championship season as well, and they did so, albeit barely and only
after coming within two points of having their career-long undefeated
streak brought to an end by an ascendant Princeton team which visited
the Murr Center in early January and nearly pulled off what would have
been a huge upset. No team could have lost players of the caliber of
Sobhy, Leonard (each of whom had spent her entire career at or near the
top of the lineup) and Sophie Mehta without becoming at least a little
more vulnerable, and everyone on the squad recognized that, as Craig
phrased it, “We don’t have as much margin for error, so we all have to
make sure we’re really ready to play our best in every match.”
Harvard came into the dual meet with Princeton knowing that a
win would be the team’s 70th in a row, tying the all-time CSA record
that Bill Doyle’s women’s teams had established from 1993-97. Doyle
himself was on hand that day, having traveled from his home in
Philadelphia to watch his daughter, Grace who did her part to preserve
her father’s record intact by beating Crimson freshman Evie Coxon in
the No. 7 match. In the opening shift, Princeton drew first blood when
its Nos. 5 and 8 players Andrea Toth and Morgan Steelman won the first
two completed matches of the day over Maddie Chai and freshman
Charlotte Orcutt respectively. Henley then won 3-0 over Princeton No. 2
Elle Ruggiero, as did Kennedy over Raneem El Torky to even the team
score at 2-all. As anxiety grew throughout the galleries overlooking
the Barnaby Courts, the two remaining second-shift matches were evenly
divided --- with Grace Doyle’s win being balanced by Craig’s victory
over Princeton No. 6 Emily Rose --- as were the first two completed
matches in the third tier, in which Moataz defeated Princeton No. 3
Caroline Spahr but Princeton’s India Stephenson won the No. 9 match 3-0
over Grace Steelman.
Those eight matches required only 25 games, just one above the
minimum, as Harvard’s sweep of the top three positions was fully
equaled by Princeton’s sweep of the bottom three slots in a rare
instance of an opposing team demonstrating much more depth than Harvard
could muster in its lineup. It all came down to a last-match-on-court
scenario at No. 4, where Evans was unable to convert a 10-6 lead in her
opening game against Emme Leonard (the younger sister of Kayley, who
was watching the match from the gallery), which Evans wound up losing
13-11. She fought back to win the second 11-5, but Leonard took the
third 11-8 and rallied late in the fourth to catch Evans at 9-all, just
two points from securing Princeton’s team win. Throughout that fourth
game, as Leonard grew closer and closer to victory, Evans’s teammates,
while fully aware and respectful of the mental toughness that had
carried her through so many close matches in the past, also became
increasingly fearful that this might be the one time that she might
crack under the mounting pressure.
On the crucial 9-all exchange, Evans lashed a backhand
cross-court, forcing a weak Leonard return that led to a stroke call,
following which Evans volleyed a backhand drop shot that barely cleared
the tin to come away with that game 11-9. She then had a 5-0 run from
2-3 to 7-3 in the fifth, but Leonard, who throughout the match kept
making late-game rallies, was able to creep back to 8-9. At that crisis
moment, with the outcome still very much hanging in the balance, Evans
spiked a head-high backhand cross-court volley into the right nick to
get to match ball (Leonard requested a let, but in vain), which she
converted by drawing Leonard up to the front-right and nailing a
forehand cross-court into the open area that died at the back wall,
barely eluding Leonard’s frantic attempt to excavate it back into play.
Ultimately, Evans was able to will her way through, showing tremendous
tenacity in a must-win match in which she was never in full control of
the action. There was a large and emotional team embrace just outside
the court, but no one raced onto the court, in keeping with Coach Way’s
edict that his team show respect for the opponent and not celebrate in
any kind of “in your face” manner (the immediate aftermath of Tarek’s
2019 Potter Cup-clinching win being an exception).
When Evans was asked afterwards how cognizant she was of the
overall team score as she was bootstrapping her way through the close
fourth and fifth games, she answered that, although she was somewhat
aware from what she called “the energy in the Murr Center gallery” that
it was very close, she was nevertheless able “to stay inside my own
bubble and focus completely on my own match and what I needed to do to
get through it.” Realizing that her strategy of hitting as hard as she
could was not working, she instead concentrated on getting better
length and ball placement, hitting her targets in the back of the court
and becoming more active at the tee when her pressure elicited an open
ball. She also cited “the calmness of Mike and the coaches and the
measured tones in which they spoke to me before the fourth and fifth
games” as a factor that “balanced out my high energy in a very
constructive way.” The many mental-training sessions that she had had
with Coach Way during her career had taught Evans how to channel her
nerves in a positive direction, and in the crucible of this
pressure-filled match, she proved that she had learned her lessons
well. As for the winner she hit at 10-9 in the fourth game and the two
consecutive winners she hit at 9-8 in the fifth, Evans said, “The ball
was just there and I hit those shots without thinking about it.” In
retrospect the most important point of the match was the 9-all point in
the fourth game on which she got a stroke call in her favor, as that
gave her a cushion, however small, to go for and execute the
close-to-the-tin backhand volley winner that closed out that game.
“MVP”
It was the first time in 46 dual meets dating back to the
final round of the 2016 Howe Cup that an opposing team had registered
more than two points against the Harvard women’s team, and the first
time in 31 dual meets dating back to the 2017 Howe Cup final that the
team had yielded more than one point. This meant that, to that
juncture, the Kennedy/Henley/Evans trio of four-year starters had gone
through their entire varsity careers without themselves or any of their
teammates playing anything approaching a must-win match in which the
dual-meet outcome hung in the balance. Kennedy found herself caught
between being so nervous as she watched the last few games of Evans’s
match that she later said she “was tempted to put my hands over my
eyes” and being exhilarated by being in the midst of such an exciting
atmosphere in the gallery, with supporters of both teams reacting
wildly after every point. The Murr Center galleries were louder and
fuller that afternoon than they had been in years during a women’s team
home match, which for the team members had a richness of experience
that made their college careers that much more complete. Indeed, even
some of the 2019 graduates, while pleased with how much success their
teams had achieved, nevertheless acknowledged that it would have been
more satisfying if their regular-season and Howe Cup matches had been
closer and more competitive during their final two dominant seasons.
After Evans had emerged triumphant from her close match
with Emme Leonard, Marwan Tarek started calling her “MVP,” a moniker
that stuck throughout the remainder of that season and quite likely
played a role in the fact that she wound up being voted the team’s MVP
for 2019-20, a nice companion-piece to the Most Improved Player
designation she had received at the end of the 2017-18 season. Although
Evans had been an extremely successful player --- and almost a
guaranteed win --- for years, her achievements were to some extent
obscured among those of her classmates Kennedy and Henley, so everyone
on the team, especially Kennedy and Henley, was happy that in this case
Evans was the one who got to wear the hero’s mantle.
In the end the narrow escape from Princeton’s upset bid
turned out to be a positive that, according to Craig, “shook us up and
made us understand that we’re all accountable to each other. Everyone
learned from that dual meet and reexamined their game tactically.”
Realizing that several players had panicked in the heat of the moment
and that more support needed to be given to the freshmen pair of Coxon
and Orcutt, neither of whom had been in that type of situation before
and both of whom had lost their matches, the team came together and ran
through all 10 of its remaining regular-season dual meets and the first
two rounds (against Colombia and Trinity) of the Howe Cup by scores of
either 9-0 or 8-1. Included in this skein was a 9-0 win over Yale that
represented its 12th consecutive victory (the last seven of them
shut-outs) over the Bulldogs, dating back to the 2011 Howe Cup
final-round loss in Coach Way’s first season as Harvard’s coach. These
results enabled the Crimson to qualify for a final-round match-up
against a Princeton team that had outplayed host Yale 6-3 in the semis
to reach the Howe Cup final for the first time in 11 years. The Harvard
players and coaching staff were very aware that the Princeton team
members had been quite active on social media, urging their followers
to show up to support them and citing their near-miss in the dual meet
as proof that they had a real chance to reclaim the Cup. Coach Way
emphasized to his players the importance that this latter dynamic
placed on the first-shift matches, while also making sure they knew
that they hadn’t really proved themselves to be a better team than
Princeton in the dual meet and that this Howe Cup rematch therefore
represented an opportunity to do so once and for all.
