Excerpt from A History of Squash at Deerfield Academy
The following 2008-09 season Charlotte Dewey was joined by her twin
sister Hallie and cousins Tori and Katie, and this trio along with
Kempner, Havens, Seldy Gray and Kathryn Grace “K.G.” Kaelin weathered a
rough start caused by injury (Charlotte Dewey severely sprained her
right ankle in a soccer game against Northfield Mount Hermon and was
sidelined until January) and illness. The four Deweys and their
teammates finished the season with a strong second-place showing behind
Greenwich Academy in the New England Interscholastics by earning one
point more than Taft. As had happened 14 years earlier in the 1995
edition of this tournament, there was a 20-minute period while the
scores were being toted up, and this time no one had figured out
beforehand what the outcome would be (as Coach Schwitter had done back
then), so when the announcement was made that Deerfield had edged out
Taft for second place, the Green and White girls cheered loudly and
giddily noted in the van ride home that they therefore came in first
among New England boarding schools.
In an incredible case of bad luck, on the Saturday exactly
52 weeks after her ankle sprain, Charlotte Dewey tore the anterior
cruciate ligament in her left knee on the same Northfield Mount Hermon
soccer field in October 2009 and was forced to miss the entire 2009-10
squash season. In her absence, a Deerfield lineup consisting of Hallie
Dewey, Nina Kempner (who courageously played the entire New England
Interscholastic weekend despite a bad case of bronchitis), Seldy Gray,
Emily Jones, Tori Dewey, Caroline Kjorlien and captain Lilly Havens all
placed either second or third in their respective brackets,
contributing to a third consecutive top-three finish in that event.
But throughout that time even the success that Coach Heise’s
troops were experiencing was shadowed by the growing frustration of
never being able to break through against their nemesis Greenwich
Academy, whose players took the New England Interscholastic trophy back
to their school on North Maple Avenue for the 14th consecutive time in
February 2010, enabling their excellent coach throughout that period,
Karen Schmidt-Fellner, a two-time late-1970’s Exeter captain and then
the No. 1 at Wesleyan, to end her tenure in a blaze of glory. Even the
few times that Deerfield had managed to defeat the Gators in the annual
dual meet, the Green and White had never been able to consolidate this
achievement in the flagship event for supremacy in New England girls
squash. By the time the 2010-11 season began, the Dewey twins, who
occupied the top two positions, were seniors; their time to defeat GA
when it truly counted was now or never, as was also true of Nina
Kempner, Seldy Gray and Katie Dewey. Being “the best boarding school”
was no longer a satisfying or acceptable consolation prize. This
quintet of seniors and their teammates Emily Jones, Tori Dewey, Addie
Fulton and Hunter Sechrest, therefore fully recognized the urgency of
that season, which they entered with a burning determination to finally
capture the crown that had eluded them for so long.
18-16
Throughout that 2010-11 year, the top two schools, both in
New England and in the nation as a whole, were Greenwich Academy and
Deerfield, and between them they so thoroughly dominated the
competitive landscape all winter that it is fair to say that that
entire year revolved around the three times that the two teams met.
Deerfield went 17-1 in dual-meet play, the one loss being in early
December by a 4-3 tally to GA, which got wins at No. 1 from Nina Scott
over Hallie Dewey, as well as at the Nos. 4-6 positions (Skylar Murphy
over Kempner, Jocelyn Lehman over Gray and Lindsey Scott over Tori
Dewey), while Deerfield’s points came from Charlotte Dewey, Jones and
Fulton. Lehman’s win over Gray was 11-9 in the fifth, and each of the
seven matches had at least one two-point game. Actually there were 10
matches played that day, with Deerfield sweeping the No. 8-10 matches,
but only the top seven matches counted in the final team score.
The two teams battled each other again a few months later in
late February at Yale University’s impressive Brady Squash Center in
the final round of the U. S. High School National Squash Championships,
a competition that had been established by the USSRA (which had renamed
itself U. S. Squash) in 2005. The match was much more closely contested
than the 6-1 score --- all four games in Charlotte Dewey’s loss to Nina
Scott were decided by two points, and all seven matches either went to
a fourth game or had at least one game that ended in a tiebreaker ---
but it marked the fourth consecutive time (and sixth overall in the
seven-year history of the tournament) that the Gators, now playing for
first-year coach Suzie Pierrepont, who had been ranked in the top 30 of
the WISPA pro women’s tour only a few years earlier, exited New Haven
in possession of the silver cup-shaped winner’s trophy. The headline of
the write-up in the local Greenwich newspaper sounded almost bored with
its declaration “Dream Realized, Again.” The opening paragraph read,
“Winning a national championship is an accomplishment most athletes can
only dream of. Yet the dynasty known as the Greenwich Academy squash
team lives the dream every year.”
Yet even the quotes of the GA players sounded more
relieved than exultant and seemed to reveal an understanding of how
formidable a rival Deerfield had become. Anna Harrison, who lost the
only match of the day to Hallie Dewey at No. 1, admitted, “We were a
little nervous playing Deerfield because the last time we played them
it was 4-3,” while her teammate Isabelle Dowling (later a co-captain of
Harvard’s national championship 2015-16 team, just as her parents Joe
Dowling and Diana Edge had been captains of their respective Crimson
championship teams in 1986-87) noted, “Even though it was 6-1, all the
matches were real close and could have gone either way, so it was
exciting.”
What was even more exciting was what happened on February
27th, when the final rounds of the 2011 New England Interscholastic
Division A Championships were played. For the first time in the history
of the tournament (which by then had grown to a seven-tier format), the
14 finalists were all from the same two schools, with each final
pitting a GA player against a Deerfield opponent, effectively turning
the Interscholastic team final into a premium-priced dual meet, this
one for all the marbles. It was hosted by Deerfield Academy and its
stunning Dewey Squash Center, which was overrun all day by students,
faculty, team family members and supporters exhorting the Green and
White and hoping for the first Deerfield team Interscholastic squash
title since Fiederovicz and her crew had triumphed back in 1995.
Playing on their home courts certainly helped the
Deerfield girls that day, as did the absence of Harrison (injured back)
and Lehman (compartment syndrome in her left leg), along with the GA
default at No. 4 when Lindsey Scott was accidentally hit in the face by
Emily Jones on a racquet follow-through late in the first game and
could not continue. Those factors aside, that afternoon and evening
exacted every ounce of physical, mental and psychic energy that
Deerfield could muster from its players, coaches and spectators, who
packed the arena all the way back to the windows, clapping loudly and
then watching breathlessly as the epic struggle forged onward to an
excruciatingly close culmination.
In addition to the default point at No. 4, Deerfield got wins
from top seeds Tori Dewey and Sechrest at Nos. 5 and 7, while Dowling
at No. 3 and Sarah Haig at No. 6 defeated Fulton and Kempner
respectively, and at No. 2 Alexandra Lunt edged Charlotte Dewey by the
narrowest of margins, 11-9 15-13 4-11 14-12. This left both the New
England Interscholastic individual championship and the New England
Interscholastic team championship to the last match on court, the No. 1
match between Hallie Dewey and Nina Scott, who had defeated Dewey
three-straight (albeit 11-9 11-9 12-10) in the dual meet 12 weeks
earlier and had won her three pre-final matches without dropping a game.
Scott won a close first game 11-8, lost an even closer second,
11-9, and won an even closer third 15-13, the overtime points of which
were long and enervating, leaving Scott ahead on the scoreboard but
gasping for breath throughout the between-games break. Noticing this,
and believing that well-placed front-court shots would therefore tire
her opponent even further, Dewey successfully pulled off several
precise drop shots which caught Scott flat-footed and fell for clear
winners at the outset of the fourth game. This gave Dewey the
confidence to continue this tactic, even a few times when she was
behind Scott in the court, and her hot streak continued to 8-0, at
which stage Scott decided to let the rest of that 11-0 game go in order
to conserve her energy for the fifth. By this time, all of the other
matches were long over, and everyone was crowded around their court,
including the players from the other schools, many of whom were hoping
that Greenwich Academy, the behemoth of prep-school squash for so long,
would finally be dethroned, even though they themselves had no personal
stake in the outcome.
The climactic final game seesawed tortuously through
regulation and into a prolonged overtime session, with each player
earning match-ball opportunities multiple times, only to have her
opponent in each case even the score. Hallie Dewey later acknowledged
that several times, as she caught her breath after a gut-wrenching
exchange, she felt on the verge of collapse, only to be revitalized by
the sight on the other side of the glass back wall of the imploring yet
supportive faces of so many friends and family members (including
Grandpa and Grandma Dewey, both in the gallery just a few rows back of
the front), all of them heartily cheering her on. By the time the tally
had reached a hair-raising 16-all, a total of seven match-balls (four
for Scott and three for Dewey) had been fended off, the points were
getting longer and longer and the darkness of the New England winter
night had enshrouded the entire campus, imposing on the crammed squash
arena the kind of riveting and dislocating force that mad dreams
sometimes exert upon a just-awakened sleeper.
In the end, this captivating struggle turned into a dream
result for Deerfield as Hallie Dewey responded to the mind-bending
exigencies of the moment by wrong-footing Scott, who was leaning for a
cross-court, and instead lashing a winning backhand drive down the near
wall. A lengthy all-court exchange then ensued that ended when a
slightly off-balance Scott attempted a forehand drive from mid-court
that bounced right back at her for an obvious match-ending stroke call
that gave the Green and White girls squash team its first New England
Interscholastic team title in 16 years and clinched what may have been,
given the magnitude of the circumstances, the opponent and the
historical backdrop, the greatest team achievement in the history of
Deerfield athletics. The for-once-vanquished Greenwich Academy players
swiftly and in some cases tearfully exited the arena, determined to
come back better than ever the following year (as indeed they did). By
contrast, the exhausted but exultant Deerfield players and their
delirious though emotionally drained supporters raced onto the court to
mob Hallie Dewey and then celebrated court-side for nearly an hour,
with cameras clicking throughout to frame and preserve the moment.
Hallie Dewey was one of six people cited in the “Faces In
The Crowd” section of the March 14th edition of Sports Illustrated, and
she and her sister Charlotte were named co-winners of the Bayne Bowl.
They then were co-captains of Deerfield’s lacrosse team (Charlotte had
also been co-captain of the soccer team) and were its two leading
scorers (Hallie tallying 40 goals and Charlotte 30), culminating that
season, appropriately enough, with a 14-13 double overtime victory over
Greenwich Academy that ended when Hallie, no stranger to triumphant
overtime endings against GA, registered the winning goal. She then
lettered all four years on Princeton’s strong teams, playing as high as
No. 6 and earning praise from legendary Tiger coach Gail Ramsay for her
“positive personality, dedication, hard work and leadership that made
her an outstanding role model for her teammates.”
