Although Princeton men’s squash had enjoyed its longest
skein of extended success during the span from 1974-81 --- winning the
Ivy League six times, posting five undefeated dual-meet seasons and at
one stage winning 43 consecutive dual meets, all Princeton records by
wide margins --- the program, once a pillar of coaching stability (John
Conroy coached the Tigers for 29 years from 1940-69), had gone through
a period of transition during the late-1970’s and early 1980’s. When
Summers left at the conclusion of Callahan’s freshman year, David
Benjamin became the coach of Princeton’s squash and tennis teams, in
keeping with a longstanding racquet-sports tradition at Princeton (and
almost every other college as well) in which the same person coached
both teams. But by the end of the 1977-78 season (in which the squash
team won both the regular-season nine-man championship and the
postseason six-man tournament, the first time that a Princeton men’s
squash team had achieved this “double”), Coach Benjamin, exhausted by
his four years of double-duty, realized that the college racquet-sports
paradigm had evolved to the point where the squash and tennis seasons
had become too overlapping, time-consuming and travel-demanding for one
person to coach both sports, and he announced that, beginning with the
1978-79 season, he would be concentrating his full energy on the tennis
team.
In the wake of this decision, Norm Peck, who had served
for six years as assistant coach first to Summers and then to Benjamin,
was promoted to the head position, which he held for the next two years
before his damaged shoulder forced him to the sidelines. Peter
Thompson, one of four members of the Class of 1979 (Frank Brosens, Bill
Fisher and Bob Bolling were the others) whose collegiate careers had
culminated with a “Triple Crown” conquest of the nine-man title the
six-man title and the Five-Man USSRA Team Championship, stepped in and
coached the team to an undefeated 1980-81 season and a second-place
finish in the postseason Six-Man team tournament before departing, as
planned, to the Darden School of Business at the University of
Virginia. The result of all this movement was that Callahan was
Princeton’s third head squash coach in as many years and the fourth in
a five-year period. The two best players from the 1980-81 team,
co-captains John Nimick (winner of the 1981 Intercollegiate Individual
tournament) and George McFarland, had both graduated, leaving a big
void at the top of the lineup, but there were 10 returning lettermen,
including co-captains Steve Loughran and Jon Moore, their senior
classmate Hunt Richardson, juniors Chris Sherry, John Fisher, Rich
Zabel, Wistar Wood, Bob Clothier and Jamie Barrett and sophomore Rob
Hill, who ascended from the No. 7 slot as a freshman all the way
to No. 1, where he played for the remainder of his college career.
Wood, Clothier and Loughran had previously been teammates on the
powerful squash team at Haverford School in suburban Philadelphia
during the late-1970’s. Four freshmen, namely Tom Shepherd and Luke
Evnin, the Nos. 2 and 3 nationally ranked juniors, along with Andover
No. 1 Bill Ullman and John Buckner filled out the roster.
Callahan understandably brought an IBM-style business-like
approach to his new craft, including taping a sign that said “THINK”
onto his telephone in imitation of one of the computer giant’s mantras.
He kept detailed spread-sheets on which he tabulated many aspects of
the players’ progress and was constantly analyzing his team’s
performance. Since Callahan had played tennis as well as squash
throughout his four years at Princeton (lettering on the tennis team
his sophomore year), he had six seasons’ worth of exposure to David
Benjamin’s coaching methods and philosophy; indeed Callahan coached
Princeton’s JV tennis team in the spring, so the two remained in close
touch. One of Benjamin’s foremost tenets was the primacy of the team as
the central unit of organization, even though both squash and tennis
are widely viewed as “individual” rather than “team” sports. Callahan
therefore had the team members not only play squash together but lift
weights together and go on group runs. He also arranged for the team to
have matching spiffy warm-up suits with orange and black stripes (even
team manager Martha Taylor got one) to enhance the team concept. During
the intercession in late January, the players stayed on campus for
two-a-day practice sessions ahead of a crucial early-February match at
Harvard. This dual meet for more than a decade had been the key moment
of the season; whichever team won the Harvard-Princeton dual meet had
gone on to win the Ivy League pennant in each of the prior 12 seasons
going back to the University of Pennsylvania’s Ivy League title in
1969. Richardson dubbed the week-long two-a-days “Preparation H”, a
joking reference to the well-known cream used to treat hemorrhoids,
with the “H” in this case standing instead for Harvard.
Callahan knew that Princeton’s 1981-82 squad would have to
rely on team depth to carry the day, given the superiority of Harvard’s
top-tier players. He also knew that only three members of his starting
nine by the early-February time that the Harvard meet occurred had ever
previously played in Hemenway Gymnasium, the aging but intimidating
Harvard squash mausoleum where so many bad things had befallen
Princeton teams over the years, including in 1980, the most recent time
that it had hosted a Harvard-Princeton dual meet. On that occasion the
Cantabs, led by their invincible superstar Michael Desaulniers, had
terminated Princeton’s 43-match winning streak 5-4, with Harvard No. 5
Chip Robie edging out Jason Fish, 15-13 in the fifth, in the last match
on court.
“TEN LITTLE INDIANS”
Robie, playing at No. 2 in the ’82 dual meet, would
earn a bare-margin win this time as well with an 18-15 fifth-game tally
over Loughran that was part of Harvard’s 4-1 advantage in the top-five
portion of the lineup. Its star freshman David Boyum won 3-1 at No. 1
over Hill, and Harvard seniors Mitch Reese and Charlie Duffy both
prevailed at Nos. 4 and 5 in five games against Barrett and Moore
respectively. The only Princeton winner in the top half of the lineup
was No. 3 Shepherd, who out-played Geordie Lemmon. For its part,
Princeton swept the Nos. 7 through 9 positions, with Evnin winning 3-0
over John Dinneen and Sherry and Fisher both surviving five-gamers
against Jim Lubowitz and Tal Johnson respectively. Sherry, who early in
his Princeton career had played as high as No. 2, let a two games to
love lead get away before reasserting himself in the 15-6 fifth game.
Fisher surmounted the disappointment of his inability to convert a
fourth-game match-ball and arm-fought his way to a 15-11 fifth-game
tally, demonstrating in the process the same match-toughness that had
been a trademark of his older brother Bill during Princeton’s memorable
late-1970’s run of success.
Often in a dual meet when one team is superior at the top and
the other team is superior in the lower half, the outcome is decided by
a “pendulum” match in the middle sector, and that is what happened on
this blustery afternoon. Princeton No. 6 Rich Zabel and his fellow
“evens” teammates No. 2 Loughran, No. 4 Barrett and No. 8 Sherry had
been sitting quietly and nervously in a small room in the bowels of
Hemenway while the “odds” matches had gone on first. The galleries were
so crowded that they would have had to stand and jockey for position if
they had tried to watch their teammates’ matches. Every time someone
knocked on the door to let them know that an “odds” match had just
ended, they all rose to their feet to see which player’s time had come
to begin his match (the No. 2 match was played on the court on which
the No. 1 match had been contested, and so on). “It was like Ten Little
Indians,” Zabel later remembered. “First Sherry left, then Loughran. It
was just two of us, Jamie and me, for about 20 minutes," Zabel added
"We were trying to joke, but we knew at least one of our matches would
be crucial." Zabel, a high-school wrestler at Trinity School on
Manhattan’s upper west side who didn’t start playing squash seriously
until his senior year, had plenty to deal with besides pre-match
nerves. The powerfully built left-hander had been playing through a
strained left quadriceps muscle for weeks and had bruised the nerves
near his knee when he banged into a side wall just a few days earlier.
Zabel’s more experienced opponent, another New Yorker
named Spencer Brog, eked out the first game 17-16 and took the second
15-11. He had three match-points in the third game as well, which, as
it turned out, were TEAM match-points since as this best-of-nine
tiebreaker was being played, Robie completed his fifth-game tiebreaker
win over Loughran that kept Harvard’s hopes alive and knotted the team
score at four matches apiece. That No. 2 match was played on one of
Hemenway’s two “stadium” courts, which had huge galleries, and Robie’s
win elicited such an enormous roar of appreciation that Zabel, playing
his No. 6 match on one of the nearby side courts, had to have known
both from the noise and from the mad spectator rush to the small
viewing space in the balcony overlooking his court that Princeton
needed to have his match land in the Orange and Black column. Indeed,
at one point early in the overtime sequence a front-row spectator
leaned so far forward that he momentarily lost his balance and nearly
fell onto the court below.
Ullman, a New Yorker himself who knew both Zabel and Brog
and who was one of MANY highly interested onlookers among the mass of
people crammed together in the gallery, remembers being struck by the
realization that the Ivy League and national championship of two teams
consisting mostly of products of New England prep schools and/or fancy
private-club junior programs hinged, ironically, not on any of these
polished performers but rather on two scrappy New Yorkers battling it
out. It WAS a battle, too --- Shepherd, who had raced over to the court
early enough after dispatching Lemmon to secure a front-row seat,
vividly recalled years later how contentious every point became as the
third game neared its climactic conclusion, with plenty of close calls
and harsh looks as the players fought for every inch of turf. Neither
Zabel nor Brog had a particularly sophisticated game or had received
much high-level coaching, but each played aggressive, physical squash
and had street smarts and competitive toughness. Boyum, by contrast,
was a product of the vaunted junior program at the Heights Casino Club
in Brooklyn Heights and his teammates Robie (Choate), Reese and Lemmon
(Exeter) and Dinneen (Deerfield) had all attended New England prep
schools, as had Barrett (St. Paul’s) and Fisher (Exeter).
After Zabel scored on a forehand roll-corner and Brog
tinned a drive, tying the overtime session at 17-all and causing a
simultaneous-game-point, there was a tense exchange at the end of which
Zabel was able to conjure up a tight backhand roll-corner (a risky shot
due to its proximity to the tin but one of Zabel’s favorite weapons)
that barely eluded Brog’s diving retrieval attempt to escape with the
third game 18-17. Buoyed by this turn of events, and by this time
confident that he had figured out a game plan that would work against
Brog (i.e. stay aggressive and keep Brog behind him, thereby
eliminating Brog’s big follow-through as a factor), Zabel won the next
two games 15-11 and 15-8 to emerge from a frenetic afternoon sporting
the hero’s mantle and essentially guaranteeing an Ivy League title.
Though initially taken aback by the hostility he sensed from the
partisan crowd, Zabel was even welcoming that aspect of the match by
the end, explaining, “That just made it more enjoyable. Every point I
won was a communal burn." Kneeling in the very first row, Martha Taylor
made eye contact with Zabel after many of the points as she cheered him
on. A full-fledged team member throughout the two years she served in
this position and a constant source of support at practices and dual
meets, Taylor later remarked on how “everything changed after Rich was
able to get through that third game. You could feel the anxiety in the
crowd as they realized that Spencer’s best chance might have come and
gone. He had been very cocky, almost dismissive, in the first portion
of the match but as Rich gained momentum Spencer’s body language really
changed and he began to crumble as the match got away from him. He
started trying desperate shots. He never gave up but he did fall apart
a bit.” Shepherd agreed that, “It was completely different after that
third game. It was clear that Zabel had gotten control and was going to
dominate the rest of the way.”
Afterwards, Zabel insisted on giving much of
the credit for his victory to his teammates and Coach Callahan. "The
one reason that I've improved is that my teammates are all so great —
to play against and to practice with — and Coach has been invaluable,"
Zabel said. "He's always spent extra time with me on the court, working
on little things a lot. And winning the match for the team made it a
hundred times sweeter than if I'd just won a match like this at a
tournament." Zabel’s teammates were so ecstatic when he hit the final
winner that many of them leaped down onto the court from the balcony of
the gallery, “like water pouring down a waterfall,” Shepherd
remembered, rather than take the longer but less jolting and more
prudent option of exiting the gallery and descending a flight of
stairs. There was a long group celebration in the court after an
exhausting but exhilarating afternoon.
Women's 2007-08 Championship Run
There was great optimism heading into the 2007-08
season, especially in the exhilarating aftermath of a Celebration Of
110 Years Of Princeton Squash that took place on October 13th. This
event was even better attended than the 100 Year Celebration had been,
with well over 200 former men’s and women’s squash players making their
way to Jadwin for the occasion. Many former head and assistant coaches
attended, including on the women’s side Sally Fields ’73, Nina Moyer,
Ann Clark ’80 and Ramsay’s current assistant coach Richard Hankinson.
Patrice McConnell ’84 made a thoughtful and touching speech about her
former coach Betty Constable, who was unable to attend the event, after
which Mr. Hankinson spoke about how much energy and love Emily
Goodfellow ’76 had put into the program during her three years at the
helm. Then the Coaches Court was dedicated (complete with a
ribbon-cutting ceremony led by men’s team alumnus Wistar Wood ‘83) and
the “all-American wall”, which listed the nearly 100 Princeton players
who had made first-team all-America, 30 of whom were women, was
unveiled. Among this number were Meredeth Quick ’01 and the team’s
current No 1 Neha Kumar, who played an exhibition match, as did Yasser
El Halaby ’06 and the Princeton’s men’s team current No. 1 Mauricio
Sanchez.
This walk down memory lane both reminded the current
team members of the program’s praiseworthy past and imbued them with
the urgency of further burnishing that legacy in the season that
awaited them, which showed plenty of promise but contained a few
question marks as well. For one thing, during the first weeks of school
tri-captain Casey Riley, who had had such a dominant season at No. 6
after playing even higher earlier in her career, again blew out her
right ACL, this time in a fluke incident. She and many of her teammates
attended Christina Fast’s 22nd birthday at the Fast residence in
Greenwich, and Riley hurt herself when she landed awkwardly while
executing a jump on a trampoline that had been set up in the back yard,
leaving her availability for the upcoming season uncertain. So to some
extent was that of another tri-captain, Margaret Kent, who had gone
13-3 as a freshman and had a win in the near-upset of Yale in 2006 but
had missed the 2007 championship run with a stress fracture of the
tibia bone in her left lower leg that had sidelined her from
early-December 2006 onward. Sophomores Kumar, Siebert and Sennatt were
all good to go, as was a fourth member of their class, Emery Maine, a
member of the 2005 U.S. Junior Women's squash team that had played in
Belgium. She had been recruited for lacrosse and did not play squash as
a freshman in order to focus on establishing herself as a first-string
attack player on Princeton’s nationally ranked lacrosse team. Maine
decided during the summer that she would play squash as well as
lacrosse during her sophomore year, and the feeling was that she would
be able to swiftly shake off the rust from her 18-month layoff and pay
solid dividends. Coach Ramsay liked to recruit squash players who also
excelled at other sports; plenty of her players had also played soccer,
field hockey, tennis and lacrosse with distinction. She also felt that
those who had played the true team sports were more likely to be
dedicated and loyal to their squash teammates, and those qualities
within the team were extremely important to her. Freshmen Julia Weigel
(Heights Casino) and Canadians Jackie Moss, Princeton’s top recruit and
the namesake (though unrelated) of a Princeton co-captain of the
1992-93 season, and Nikki Sequeira joined the roster, which was also
bolstered by juniors O’Toole and Aly Brady.
Just as she had done nine years earlier during the run to
the 1998 Howe Cup, Ramsay had promised her players during the 2006-07
season that if they won that year’s Howe Cup, she would allow them to
arrange a trip during fall break. This time they went to Trinidad and
Tobago, where Joanna Scoon had grown up. They all stayed at the Scoon
residence during their stay in Tobago and at a hotel when they then
moved to Trinidad, where they had a number of matches against the local
players. The courts were “outdoors,” meaning that they had a roof but
the side walls did not reach it, causing the courts to be hot and very
lively. There were fitness drills and squash sessions every day, but
the team also rented a boat and did some sight-seeing, snorkeling and
hiking, as well as some group jumps into the waterfalls, though Riley,
just a few weeks removed from her trampoline episode, wisely did not
participate in this latter activity. As it happened, the men’s team had
their four-year trip during the same time frame, and when its players
returned from Egypt, both teams threw what they called a “Trin-Gyptian
party,” a play on the two respective places that they had recently
visited. The women players wore Caribbean garb and the men players
dressed in Egyptian attire. The two teams were very bonded with each
other during those heady years for both programs (the men’s team won
four straight Ivy League pennants from 2006-09), almost as though they
were one big team, and frequently on Sunday evenings they would all
meet at one of the eating clubs – either the Cottage Club, Tiger Inn or
the Ivy Club --- for a get-together that was dubbed “Sexy Sunday.”
Siebert took over the team’s No. 1 slot when she won
the mid-January Constable Invitational, defeating her teammate Maine in
a five-game semifinal and then winning the final, 10-8 in the fourth,
over Trinity’s Tehani Guruge, who had advanced to that stage by
out-playing Princetonians Grabowski, Moss and the 2007 champion Kumar.
Remarkably, Riley was already back in action at her pre-injury
mid-lineup position by then. From her prior ACL tears, she was aware
that if she underwent an operation, she would likely be sidelined for
her entire senior season. Therefore, in consultation with her surgeon,
Dr. Arthur Bartolozzi, she made the gutsy decision to try to delay the
operation until the spring and embark on an intense physical-therapy
regimen that she hoped would allow her to “manage” her knee issue and
play through the injury. This plan worked so well that she actually won
the Constable B draw by conquering her teammate Joanna Scoon in a
four-game final. Throughout that season, Riley wore a big brace on her
knee to provide it with additional support. She and her fellow
tri-captains Grabowski and Kent all showed up dressed as Quakers during
the last team practice session before the season’s first big test on
the road against Penn shortly after the conclusion of final exams. The
three captains stood at the front wall in their Quaker garb (including
hats) while their teammates pelted them with pink foam balls (the type
used to teach squash to children) to symbolize the treatment that the
team hoped to have in store for the Penn players.
The Penn matches, especially when they were at the
Ringe Courts, always had a different atmosphere, since they were
contested on a Wednesday evening rather than a weekend afternoon. The
fact that a number of the Princeton players were from the Philadelphia
area, and would therefore be playing in front of their friends and
parents, added an extra, more personal dimension, as did the fact that
Penn’s women’s coach was Jack Wyant, Princeton Class of ’96, Missy’s
older brother. Jack Wyant brought the same level of intensity and
competitive zeal into his coaching position at Penn that he had
displayed as a three-year captain of the Princeton men’s squash team
(and, for that matter, that Missy had evinced during her two-year
captaincy of the women’s team), and, though he loved the years he had
spent at Old Nassau, that very experience paradoxically sharpened his
wish to have his Penn team knock off his alma mater.
Riley, who turned 22 on the day of the Penn meet, won her
match against Christina Matthias, as part of a 3-0 sweep of the first
tier of matches that included wins by Moss and Kent. Grabowski then
quickly cashed in a fourth Princeton win in as many completed matches
in the most one-sided score of the day, 9-1, 1 and 3. Shockingly, the
dual meet then took a complete about-face as Penn, fueled by a hometown
crowd that grew increasingly loud and raucous as the possibility of
knocking off the reigning champs became greater, swept all five of the
remaining matches to hand Princeton its first setback since the 2006
Howe Cup. Sennatt absorbed the first loss of her college dual-meet
career, and an out-of-sorts, physically sub-par Kumar lost 3-0 to
Alisha Turner. Lange then won, 9-1 in the fourth, over Siebert, Annie
Madeira took her match with O’Toole in four games and at No. 4 Tara
Chawla, after a prolonged mid-match slump, gained her top form in time
to emerge victorious against Maine by a score of 9-4, 2-9, 2-9, 9-6,
9-3. Almost every match had an unpleasant feel to it, with the play
being physical to the point of chippy-ness, which had an impact on the
refereeing as well. After the matches ended, the Penn players and
coaching staff celebrated their victory in what struck some of the
Princeton players as a rather taunting way.
BLESSING IN DISGUISE
The tenor of the entire experience left several Princeton
players fuming and plotting revenge. Clearly there was no love lost
between the two teams. Riley expressed a number of her teammates’
viewpoint when she said, “It was hard to see our undefeated streak
broken, especially by a team like Penn. Although they deserved to win
that night, they certainly will not be as successful at the Howe Cup.”
The feeling among the Princeton players was that a number of the
members of Penn’s team were a little too talky and cocky, “a bit
arrogant and full of themselves for a team that’s never won anything,”
according to one Princeton player. Riley, who had more “skin in the
game” than anyone on Princeton’s team due to her insistence on playing
even with a torn ACL, also expressed to her teammates that they may
have become “complacent” after winning the 2007 Howe Cup, and that they
all needed to learn from this loss and step up their conditioning and
commitment, including reviving the team-wide “go dry” policy of the
prior season. It was a praiseworthy case of a captain truly stepping
forward and being a captain, and she and her chastened teammates took
some of their anger out on Yale three days later with a 6-3 home win.
The Elis had tremendous strength at the top of their lineup, with
Ranieri, Logan Greer and Sarah Toomey all winning in straight games
over Siebert, Kumar and Moss respectively, But Princeton swept the rest
of the board clean, with No. 4 Maine and No. 5 Sennatt both winning in
five games (in Sennatt’s case 9-0 in the fifth after dropping the first
two games) and Riley, O’Toole, Grabowski and Kent all handily
prevailing as well.
Afterwards Grabowski reflected on the degree to which the loss
to Penn might have been a blessing in disguise. “We were really pumped
up for the Yale match,” she declared. “The loss to Penn a few days
before really woke us up. It brought us together as a team better than
anything else could have. Before we knew how to play for ourselves, but
after, we understood how to play for the team.” The following day,
Princeton shut out Mark Talbott’s Stanford squad, with the highlight
being Siebert’s four-game win at No. 1 over the 2006 Intercollegiate
champion Lily Lorentzen, who had transferred from Harvard after having
led the Crimson to the 2006 Ivy League pennant. The team then posted a
6-3 road win over a Harvard team that was struggling through a rare
down season in the wake of the loss of five members of the 2007
starting nine to graduation, as well as the severe hip-flexor injury
that plagued Balsekar throughout that winter. The dual-meet season then
ended with a 5-4 loss to Trinity at Hartford, in which Riley lost in
five games to Jo-Ann Jee and Maine did the same against Nayelly
Hernandez. This disappointment aside, the Tigers kept their eyes
trained firmly on the prize, i.e. the looming Howe Cup, which would be
held in the friendly confines of Jadwin Gymnasium, where they hadn’t
lost in more than two years.
They wouldn’t lose there that weekend either. They took
the measure of Yale in a semifinal in which Princeton, spurred by No. 3
Moss’s dramatic fifth-game surge from 5-8 to 10-8 that avenged her loss
to Toomey a few weeks earlier, swept the Nos. 3 through 9 matches to
qualify for a final-round battle against Penn, which had won its
semifinal against Trinity. The Princeton players had been laying for
the Quakers ever since their four matches to love lead had slipped away
four weeks earlier in Philadelphia, and they were happy to be playing
them again, this time on their own home turf and this time for all the
marbles. When the climactic battle began, Penn got off to a good start
by winning two of the three first-tier matches, with only Sennatt
getting on the scoreboard with her repeat win over Matthias at No. 6.
But in the second shift, No. 5 Riley beat Hebden, three games to love,
the same score by which No. 8 O’Toole triumphed over Emily Goodwin. The
No. 2 match slotted Kumar against her Canadian compatriot (and former
training partner) Turner, who had won their dual-meet encounter, three
games to love.
Turner took a 7-3 lead in the opening game, but Kumar, who
had struggled with an ankle injury through the entire second half of
the season, went on a shot-making tear that brought her that game 9-7
and the second 9-6. In the third game, Turner courageously saved
several match-balls against her and tied the game at 8-all. The match
was definitely in the balance at that juncture, but Kumar was able to
get the serve back and win the game 10-8. Her win put Princeton ahead
four matches to two and on the brink of clinching a second straight
Howe Cup. Afterwards, Kumar described the mindset that she had to
achieve that allowed her to play at her best level even while dealing
with the pain in her ankle. “Mentally, my strategy was to block out the
pain I was feeling and to make my body think that it was 100 percent
and could do whatever my mind wanted it to do,” she said. “I also
focused on taking one point at a time and thinking of the strengths of
my game and avoided thinking about what I was missing or could not do
because of my injury.” Kumar had been in top physical shape when that
season began after spending the summer doing track workouts and core
muscle exercises under the guidance of Mark McKoy, a Canadian hurdler
who had won a gold medal at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. But
she had badly sprained her right ankle while competing in a women’s pro
tournament early that winter, requiring her to have the ankle heavily
taped, over and above the brace she had worn for years after suffering
a number of ankle sprains during her years playing the Junior
tournament circuit (and winning the Canadian National Juniors in
several age categories).
With Lange favored to defeat Siebert at No. 1, Princeton
still needed a win from either Maine at No. 4 or Grabowski at No. 7.
Grabowski, who had scored the Cup clincher against Harvard a year
earlier, was on the verge of duplicating this achievement when she
twice held a third-game match-ball against Madeira, only to be stymied
both times as Madeira eked out a 10-9 score to keep alive Penn’s hopes
of staging the same kind of eleventh-hour rally that its members had
pulled off at Ringe less than a month earlier. But after splitting the
first two games of her match against Tara Chawla, Maine, who had
sustained brutal five-game defeats in deciding matches against both
Penn and Trinity during the prior few weeks, totally dominated the 9-1,
9-0 remainder to seal Penn’s fate. She had wanted a rematch with Chawla
ever since losing to her in the dual meet and knew she needed to attack
much more this time around. Even after winning the one-sided third game
to go up two games to one, Maine was keenly aware that she had also led
Chawla by that margin in the earlier match and had allowed her opponent
to wrest control away from her.
Determined not to allow a repeat, Maine re-entered the
court for the fourth game strongly focused on the importance of the
opening sequence of points, which she dominated and never looked back.
In the immediate aftermath of her victory, she and many of her
teammates embraced each other in the hallway just outside her court,
but they stayed relatively restrained out of respect for the fact that
Grabowski and Madeira were still duking it out and each still wanted to
win, even with the team outcome now accounted for. Grabowski wound up
winning, 9-7 in the fifth, to close out the 6-3 score, leading to a
huge team-wide celebration just outside the main gallery court.
Afterwards, Maine hearkened back to the dual meet with Penn. “I think
that the previous loss to Penn actually made us stronger going into the
finals,” she said, echoing Grabowski’s comments after the
early-February win over Yale. “We wanted it more, and we had learned
from our mistakes and were determined to get revenge. We had great
leadership, and we all wanted to win for each other, which is something
that I think makes our team really special. We truly were a team in
everything that we did, win together, lose together, so to be able to
share this great accomplishment with each other and to come out on top
is really special.” Although Sennatt likewise felt that the Penn match
was a key part of the championship, she experienced its import slightly
differently than her teammates, claiming that it paradoxically took
some of the pressure of being defending champs off the team, enabling
the players to go through the remainder of the season and into the Howe
Cup with less of a target on their backs. Noting that the team hadn’t
lost since the 2006 Howe Cup, Sennatt said that it “was good to know
what losing felt like” in order to motivate the team not to have that
sour taste in their mouths again anytime soon.
Heart-felt tribute was paid to Riley, Kumar and Grabowski,
all three of whom came back from significant injuries to capture
crucial matches in the Howe Cup final. Riley, who swept all three of
her weekend matches and showed up for her match with Hebden wearing
orange nail polish to mark the occasion of this being her last
competitive appearance at Jadwin, declared, “This is even more exciting
than last year because we were the underdog. We had great fan support
with huge crowds today. I couldn't think of a better way to end my
career.” Riley’s ability to consistently win matches throughout her
college career in spite of her continuing significant knee issues was a
source of wonderment to her teammates, and largely due to what one of
them called her “insanely good hands.” Her lateral movement was
noticeably compromised by her ACL injuries, but she made up for it by
establishing favorable court positioning and by executing a lethal
shallow forehand kill shot. In July, Riley underwent surgery to repair
her ACL.
For Grabowski, whose left knee had swelled up like a
grapefruit in November, causing fluid to have to be drained and
necessitating frequent physical therapy sessions in December and
January, the repeat title was especially sweet considering the hurdles
that she and her Princeton teammates overcame along the way. "It was
pure joy, almost a feeling of shock," said Grabowski, who, in addition
to her squash exploits, was named to the All-Ivy Academic team in the
spring. "We had been working for this since September and the start of
preseason. It was awesome. Last year we had such a strong team and all
the matches were 6-3 or better. This year we had to come from behind.
It was more of a challenge to have the team operate as one unit. We had
to work harder; it was special."
She had actually trailed Madeira 7-5 in the fifth game,
but even though by then she knew that the outcome of her match didn’t
matter since the Cup had already been secured, nevertheless her mindset
was, in her words, “I wasn't coming off that court without a win. I
didn't want to lose in front of my family and friends, so I pulled
something down deep." Although Grabowski would have loved to have
converted one of her third-game match-balls, ultimately she was happy
that it was Maine who provided the Cup-clincher, given what a valuable
addition Maine had been all season and in light of how distraught Maine
had been after her dual-meet loss to Chawla. Indeed, during the trophy
presentation, Ramsay explicitly cited Maine’s decision to return to
competitive squash as having been a crucial part of that season’s
championship drive.
An ecstatic Coach Ramsay basked in the glow of this
companion-piece to the 1998/1999 Howe Cup “double.” Both times her
troops had been required to win the second Howe Cup final against a
team that had beaten them during the regular season. "I was so
thankful," she asserted. "They worked so hard and wanted it so much. It
was one of those things; it hasn't always happened for teams that
worked hard. Last year was an incredible feat but this was great in a
different way. For me as a coach, it was more of a challenge. I spent a
lot of time on the court with them; they were really committed." Though
still hampered by her ailing ankle even after resting it throughout the
week between the Howe Cup and the Individuals at the Naval Academy in
Annapolis, Kumar was able to advance to the quarterfinals, where she
lost to the eventual champion Ranieri, who defeated Lange in the finals.
The very next day after returning from Maryland, while her
teammates relaxed and enjoyed their second straight Howe Cup triumph,
an understandably still-fatigued Maine had to go to lacrosse practice,
having missed the entire preseason due to the substantial overlap
between the two sports. She played sparingly on the lacrosse team that
spring, by the end of which she realized that playing on two
consecutive-season teams was not realistic and that she would have to
choose one or the other. Her experience on the squash team that winter,
culminating as it had in her winning the deciding point in the
championship round, made the decision a no-brainer for this
multi-talented athlete.
