Excerpts from A Century of Champions: 100 Years of College Squash 2009 Potter Cup Final
SO CLOSE
A rematch between Princeton and Trinity in the 2009 Potter Cup final
one week later was inevitable, and it took place on February 22nd, 11
years to the day after the Trinity men’s team had last lost a match
when Harvard edged the Bantams 5-4 in the 1998 Potter Cup final. This
2009 editon of the National Team Championship turned out to be one of
the most dramatic events ever held at Jadwin Gymnasium in any sport,
and one of the two or three most memorable Potter Cup finals in the
history of college squash. The Princeton crowd was so amped up that
Trinity Coach Assaiante was roundly booed during the introductions, a
situation he deftly defused with a response – “I haven’t been booed
this much since I saw my ex-in-laws!” --- that cracked everybody up.
There were several reversed results from the dual meet eight days
earlier, including in the first tier of matches, where No. 9 Peter
Sopher, who had lost his dual-meet match 3-2 to Chris Binnie,
out-dueled Rushabh Vora 3-1, marking the first time that Trinity had
lost at No. 9 in its 13 consecutive years of Potter Cup finals. At No.
6 Hesham El Halaby duplicated his dual-meet win over Supreet Singh,
this time in five games instead of three. Throughout much of the
younger El Halaby’s praiseworthy Tiger career, many of the winners he
hit during home matches, especially at key moments, would be celebrated
with drawn-out calls of “Heeesh!” from the appreciative spectators, and
this rallying cry was in full-throated throttle throughout his
masterful performance in the fifth game. At No. 3 Callis, who had
narrowly beaten Mathur in the dual meet, won the first game and was up
8-6 in the second, game-ball to go up two-love, but Mathur managed to
salvage that game 10-8, benefiting from some late-game Callis tins.
Callis then jumped way ahead in the third game, scoring many points
with his straight drop-and-volley one-two combination. He won that game
9-0 to go up 2-1, putting Princeton just one game from exiting the
opening tier of matches with a 3-0 advantage. But Callis had endured a
brutal 100-minute match the day before in which he had rallied to win
in five games against Rochester’s Hameed Ahmed, and he wilted under a
revived Mathur’s onslaught in the final two games, both of which went
to the Trinity captain 9-2.
In the second tier of matches, Trinity No. 8 Vikram Malhotra
straight-gamed Imberton and Canner prevailed over Randy Lim, both
repeat results from the dual meet. Detter had handily subdued Wong the
last several times the pair had played, including by a 9-6, 4 and 4
score in the recent dual meet. But Princeton’s top players had a
history of always playing better in rematches against opponents who had
beaten them the first time, and in this instance, Wong followed
Callahan’s instructions to slow down the pace, play long points and
keep Detter from hyping up the play. Wong and Detter had a rivalry
going back even before their college years that was rooted, at least in
part, in the fact that Detter’s national coach in Sweden, John Milton,
previously coached Wong at Wycliffe College, the prep school that Wong
attended in England. Wong led 2-0, 4-1 and later 6-5, just three points
from what would have been a crucial Princeton win. But Detter, who had
proved himself to be a Tiger-killer three years earlier in his
back-from-the-dead 2006 dual-meet win over Yasser El Halaby, inexorably
wrested control of the play during the rest of that 9-6 game and
throughout the 9-1, 9-3 fourth and fifth. Wong valiantly kept
competing, even as his legs increasingly cramped up, but Detter plowed
through to the tape to even the team score at three matches apiece. The
Princeton coaches were moved almost to tears as they watched Wong try
his hardest on an empty tank, extending the match for an additional 50
minutes on “nothing but pure guts,” according to Coach Pomphrey.
All three of the third-tier matches were resolved by a fifth game as
the competition treacherously careened into a fifth and then a sixth
and eventually even a seventh hour before an increasingly frenzied
horde of onlookers shoehorned into every available crevice of Jadwin’s
galleries. Indeed, the building’s fire-code limit was exceeded by an
enormous margin that day and the C Level floor of the gymnasium was so
crammed with spectators that the security staff was concerned that the
entire floor might actually collapse. The Zanfrini fencing room near
the galleries was set up with a video feed on the main gallery court,
but even that room swiftly became filled to the brim.
Normally the matches are played on adjacent courts, but in this case
there was an empty court in between so people could position themselves
there and crane their necks to watch at least part of the courts to
their left and/or right. Shannon and his long-time close friend and
fellow Calgary native Letourneau went on at approximately the same
time, in each case to face opponents with whom they had had close
matches one week earlier. Shannon, as noted, had failed to make good on
a two games to one advantage against Vargas in what was Shannon’s first
varsity match in the six weeks since he had slipped in a heavy snowfall
while coming down the steps outside his dorm and pulled a muscle in his
back. He lost the first two games in his rematch with Vargas but then
hit his stride, volleying with a degree of aggressiveness that pushed
Vargas out of his comfort zone and out-scoring his opponent 27-9 over
the final three games.
Leading four matches to three, Princeton needed just one more win from
either Letourneau or Sanchez to capture the 2009 National Championship.
Both came about as close as one can to delivering it. Letourneau, who
had barely lost his dual-meet match, 10-8 in the fourth, to Parth
Sharma, did a wonderful job of following the instructions he had
received from the coaching staff to “close down the court” on Sharma by
keeping the ball tight to the walls and using his power game to
constrict the playing field and mitigate his foe’s fleetness afoot.
This strategy enabled Letourneau to earn a 2-0, 7-2 lead, but Sharma
staged a late somewhat desperate rally, aided by a few Letourneau tins
when he tried to force winners, a task made more difficult by how hot
the ball had become. Sharma made off with that game 9-7, whitewashed
Letourneau in the fourth and grabbed a 3-0 led in the fifth --- 19
consecutive points, albeit with many hands-out. Letourneau courageously
fought back and the game seesawed to 7-all, leading to the longest
exchange of the match, what Assaiante later described as “a
helter-skelter frenzy that was almost unbearable to watch.” Letourneau
eventually tinned a drive to give Sharma the serve. On the ensuing two
points, a Letourneau tin and a stroke call against him allowed Sharma
to claim a 9-7 comeback win. Peter Sopher later remarked that Sharma’s
intensity level throughout that fifth game was “like nothing I have
ever seen.”
“IT SEEMED TO GO ON FOREVER”
With the score now 4-all, the two best players in college squash,
Sanchez and Chaudhry, battled intensely for the national team
championship. Chaudhry went up two games to one, but Sanchez went from
5-2 to 9-2 in the fourth and then charged to 5-0 in the fifth,
constituting a 9-0 run. After coaching Sanchez in the between-games
break prior to the fifth game, Callahan spent the entire last game
nervously pacing in the corridor just outside his office. He and
Pomphrey were unable to watch due to the size of the crowds, but, that
aside, Callahan was too nervous to bring himself to even try to watch.
Pomphrey and some of the late-finishing players and Bob’s younger
brother Brian were in Callahan’s office with the door open and Callahan
pacing outside.
Several of the players had their noses pressed against the office
window overlooking the court, and they reported the result of each
rally to Pomphrey, who then relayed it to Callahan. Pomphrey’s summary
of this situation was, “It seemed to go on forever, and it was
excruciating. For sure Bob and I could have watched through the office
window if we’d wanted to. We never spoke about it, but since we used to
think alike, I’m sure he didn’t want to do it because (a) the last
thing either of us wanted was for Mau to see us looking down from that
window --- he had enough pressure to deal with as it was, and (b) this
was a day for the guys on the team, whether top nine or JV, and we
would be taking places away from them if we took their spots at the
window.”
Sanchez was a terrific athlete --- once Princeton’s varsity track coach
happened to see Sanchez running sprints and asked him to try out for
the track team --- but was prone to hit occasional loose drives, which
was the worst thing one could do against the 6’4” Chaudhry, who was
expert at backing opponents out with his sizable body and then crushing
the ball down the open wall. Later some of the Princeton players said
that they felt the play was always on Chaudhry’s racquet, but that at
5-0, with Sanchez having the momentum and the score in his favor, they
thought Sanchez was positioned to win. On the other hand, Trinity coach
Assaiante, when asked by his assistant coach (and former star player)
Reggie Schonborn if he felt that Chaudhry was going to win, responded,
“I don’t know, but I can’t imagine him not doing so.” The expectations
of others aside, Chaudhry answered the challenges and exigencies of the
moment by imposing the full thrust of his fearsome arsenal when it was
needed the most, surging through the next seven points, after which the
score remained 7-5 for a number of hands-out. Chaudhry finally got to
match ball on a wall-hugging drive and ripped a cross-court past
Sanchez, whose last-ditch effort to flip the ball off the back wall
plummeted to the floor well short of the front wall like a bird that
had been shot through the heart. The outcome of the 2009 Potter Cup
final brought the consecutive-matches-won total of the Trinity College
men’s squash team to 202, breaking the record of 201 set by Yale’s
men’s swimming team from 1940-61 and making the Trinity men’s squash
team the winningest team in the history of college athletics.
In the post-match team gatering, Callahan implored his devastated
players to understand that they were winners in his mind, that the
fight itself does mean something, and that he had never seen a team
fight harder than Princeton had that day. He later sounded a similar
theme when he told Daily Princetonian
reporter Zach Kwartler that he emphasized to his players “that
champions are what’s on the inside, not just on the outside. Just
because you don’t have the biggest piece of silver doesn’t mean you are
not a champion.” Of the three seniors who had meant so much to
Princeton squash throughout their careers Callahan said, “Not only are
they special players, but they are special leaders and people. It will
be very hard to come back next year without them. They will be sorely
missed but never forgotten.” Indeed the Three Amigos will be
forever remembered in Princeton squash lore for leading Princeton men’s
squash to its first-ever stretch of four consecutive Ivy League
pennants and its first-ever stretch of four consecutive Potter Cup
finals --- but they were never quite able to take that final step. That
latter feat would be for another Princeton team to accomplish, not too
far down the road.
“NOT ON MY WATCH”
When Chaudhry was asked years later to relive the fifth game of his
match with Sanchez, he recalled, “I remember when I came off the court
after losing the 4th game, nobody mentioned that the Team score was
tied 4-4 and my match was the decider. However, at the start of the
fifth game, most of my teammates were outside my court and they didn't
seem super jubilant, so I figured I was probably playing the decider.
And here I was 5-0 down in the fifth with the entire streak on the
line. I tried to stay in the moment as Coach Paul always taught. I
don't think I panicked at any point, I was just surprised how I was 5-0
down all of a sudden. From experience, I knew it was a matter of a
rally or two to shift the momentum so my plan was simple: hang in, dig
deep and play to my strengths which was tight, error-free squash. We
also had the nine-point scoring system at that time, which helped. I
was really lucky to make the comeback and clinch the fifth game and win
the National Championship for my team. I remember all my teammates
bursting onto the court hugging and lifting me. It was surreal with
tears of joy here and there. Definitely one of the most cherished
memories of my life. I think credit should also be given to the late
Bob Callahan (always a big fan of his) and his team, who fought so hard
with such grace.The pressure of playing for Trinity was immense. Every
time we stepped on the court, we knew we were a hot target as everyone
wanted to end the streak. You were not only representing yourself but
also your brothers battling it out with you and the ones that came
before. The last thing you wanted was to be the reason for that streak
to end. It was a big motivator. ‘Not on my watch’ was our mantra.”
2003 Women's Ivy League Championship
The following 2002-03 season brought two of the long-time crown jewels
of USSRA junior squash to Yale in Michelle Quibell and Amy Gross, each
a winner of multiple U. S. Junior titles (Quibell had also annexed some
Scottish and British Junior crowns) and teammates on the U.S. Junior
squads in both 1999 and 2001, as well as Rachita Vora, a national
junior team member for India, where her coach growing up was Rehmat
Khan, who had been Jahangir Khan’s coach when the latter had his run of
10 straight British Open titles from 1982-91. All three promptly moved
into the top tier of Yale’s ladder, with Quibell remaining at No. 1
throughout her sparkling four-year career, followed by Gross at No. 2,
Ho at No. 3 and Vora at No. 4. They were all at a peak in the one-sided
Howe Cup semis win over Harvard. Anything seemed possible coming into
the Sunday summit with Trinity, but the powerful defending-champion
Bantams were rested and ready to play their best squash, while the
Elis, exhilarated but exhausted both physically and mentally by their
semifinal win the previous evening, were unable to duplicate that
performance and absorbed a 9-0 shut-out.
Trinity junior Pam Saunders set the tone immediately with a quick 9-4,
1 and 0 win over Yale No. 3 Frances Ho and the Bantams never looked
back. In the last match of the day, Helal lost her first two games
against Quibell. With the team outcome having long been settled, it
would have been fully understandable if Helal had let that match go,
and it is therefore a tribute to her competitive spirit that she
instead rallied and won the last three games to complete the 9-0
shut-out.
That year, and for the final time, the Harvard-Yale dual meet occurred
after the Howe Cup tournament, which meant that just four days after
defeating the Crimson in New Haven, the Bulldogs had to travel to
Cambridge to play Harvard again, this time with the 2003 Ivy League
title hanging in the balance, since neither team had lost to an Ivy
League opponent that winter.The Yale players, by contrast, had spent
themselves by then and had to make do without the crowd energy that had
spurred them on at the Brady Courts. In recalling their disappointing
evening in Cambridge many years later, several Yale players noted that,
even before the match began, “everything was different” from the way it
had been when the two teams had met the prior weekend. The courts were
different, not only geographically but also in how they played --- the
Yale courts were active and lively, rewarding the deep game and long,
attritional points, while the Murr Center courts were better suited to
shot-making, and at Harvard a drive that caught a side wall would come
much further out into the middle, making the stroker more vulnerable to
having a let-point called against her.
The crowd allegiance, of course, was also different, and so, as noted,
were the teams’ respective mind-sets in the wake of the Howe Cup
result. This became even more the case when Harvard got off to an early
lead by swiftly winning a few of the “evens” matches that had landed in
Yale’s column a few days earlier, thereby increasing the pressure on
the odd-numbered Yale players and making them realize that they had no
margin for error and that they had to win their matches for Yale to
gain possession of the Ivy League crown, which it had last won 17 years
earlier in 1986. The Yale team, though highly talented, was also still
very young, with three freshmen and one sophomore filling the top four
slots, and the magnitude of the moment bore heavily down on them.
LET THEM EAT CAKE
As if the prospect of winning another Ivy League title and avenging a
recent one-sided defeat wasn’t enough motivation, the Harvard women’s
team was unintentionally supplied a further spur shortly prior to the
beginning of the match by the mother of one of the Yale players, who in
anticipation of what would have been Yale’s first Ivy League crown in
nearly two decades, baked cupcakes which she brought to the arena. Each
of them had white topping with a single blue letter, and when properly
arranged the cupcakes’ letters spelled out “Yale Ivy League Champions.”
One of the Harvard players happened to see the array of cupcakes and
relayed the news to her teammates in the locker room, further charging
the competitive atmosphere, which in any case by all accounts was
nothing short of electric all night long.
Yale had a strong chance to win all the way till the end in a
competition in which the lines between these two teams were starkly
drawn. The Bulldogs swept the Nos. 3-6 spots without losing a single
game, but Harvard sophomore Stephanie Hendricks repeated her Howe Cup
win over Ruth Kelley at No. 9, and Wilkins roared out of the gate and
never looked back in recording her first-ever victory over Gross. Both
the Nos. 7 and 8 matches “flipped”, with Harvard’s Alison Fast
reversing her recent loss to Dalzell (who afterwards said she felt like
she “had lead in her sneakers that night”) and Crimson co-captain Ella
Witcher doing the same against Doline. With the score thus knotted at
four matches apiece, the Ivy League championship would be decided by
the No. 1 match between Hall and Quibell, with both sets of parents
present (the Quibells flew up from Atlanta and the Halls drove from
suburban Philadelphia). The energy level in that Hall-Quibell match was
extraordinary, both on court and in the gallery, as both players
competed at their absolute limit, all the while demonstrating superb
sportsmanship in a memorable exhibition of women’s college squash at
its best.
After dropping the opening game in a tiebreaker, Hall surged through
the second and third, but Quibell earned an 8-6 advantage in the
fourth. However, Hall rallied to force the game into a tiebreaker. She
was unable to convert her first match-ball at 9-8, but she got the
serve back and made good on the second with a forehand working-boast
from deep in the right part of the court that a diving Quibell failed
to retrieve and tossed her racquet skyward in exasperation. In a
post-match interview, Baj paid tribute to his star player when he
asserted, “It was always in the cards that Hall was going to pull a big
one out.” Jubilant at this victory, and the 10th Ivy League crown in 12
years for the Harvard women that it secured, the team then marked this
milestone several hours later by “streaking” around a section of
Harvard Yard late that night, as one team member put it, “in honor of
Primal Scream, which none of us had participated in during January
finals. Never a dull moment with the squash ladies!”
It was to be the last moment of unconstrained celebration for Hall and
the Harvard women’s squash team for some time to come, as the following
week Hall was decked with a bad enough case of the flu to keep her out
of the Individuals at Trinity, where Helal, playing on her home courts,
successfully defended her 2002 crown, beating Quibell in the semis and
Reta in the final. None of Hall’s teammates were able to advance past
the quarterfinals. By vote of the college coaches, that tournament was
renamed the Ramsay Cup a few months earlier in deference to Gail
Ramsay’s four-straight trumphs from 1977-80. Throughout the several
years that followed, Yale, with Quibell, Gross, Frances Ho et al
continuing to grow as players and a host of talented recruits joining
them as well (especially Kat McLeod, a New Zealander, whose presence in
the top three made the team even stronger), reigned supreme in Howe Cup
competition. By the end of the 2003-04 season, the Yale contingent had
become so deep and imposing that their captain Devon Dalzell, who had
played in the top three her freshman year, was no longer even in the
starting nine.
