Trinity Women Boosted by January Recruit, Return of Two Veterans
by David Keating

photo Trinity Athletics

January 19, 2016 - Trinity College squash again has a midseason surprise for teams battling the Bantams as the college squash season reaches high gear this month. This year, it’s the women’s team that will be far stronger due to a January recruit and the return of two strong players in the second half of the season.

The Bantam men may well be the team to beat, having won 77 individual matches while losing just four as the team compiled a 9-0 record and retained the #1 college ranking.

Those who thought Stanford’s upset 5-4 win over the Trinity women in November meant the team was out of the running for a top finish are sorely mistaken.  While clearly the Cardinal have greatly improved and have become a real force, as confirmed by their strong 7-2 win over #8 Columbia last weekend, two Trinity players starting now, Salma El Defrawy and Anna Kimberley, were missing in that and most early season contests.  El Defrawy was out with a concussion and Kimberley was in Australia for fall semester abroad.

Equally important, a strong recruit, Jenny Haley, from Caldicot, Wales is now in the lineup. While she is currently playing #6 for the team, it’s possible she could rise further if her team and junior results are any indication.  In her first matches, against #7 Cornell, #8 Columbia and #15 F&M, she has allowed fewer points in her matches than her teammates immediately above or below her on the ladder as the #6 Bantams rolled to three consecutive victories while dropping just one individual match.  In junior competition, she was a quarterfinalist at the 2014 US Junior Open. At the 2015 British Junior Open, she played very competitively with two 9/16 seeds.

Co-captain Sachika Balvani praised Haley’s play on court and said it’s “always better to have a January recruit” and that Trinity is a “very different team than in November.”

Haley arrived January 2, when the team got back together to begin practices after the holiday break.  Haley’s appearance on the team in January might have been in doubt, but on December 21, she tweeted “Student visa has been approved!”

She has played in a team environment before, noting that she represented “Wales since age 14 or15 in the European team championships.” Her interest in college squash was triggered when, at just age 15, she played for Wales, with teammate Tesni Evans, in the 2011 junior women’s squash team championship that was played at Harvard University.

Haley told me she is “really looking forward to seeing what we can do – we’re training hard and playing well.”

Kimberly, El Defraway, and Haley add significant strength to the team, playing at positions 4, 5, and 6.  Against Stanford, Trinity’s then #5, who along with the other lower ladder players lost to Cardinal women, now plays #9, and so the Bantams now have a very deep team.

The stronger team will face key tests later this month with matches against, Yale, Penn and Harvard, three of the four top teams in the rankings.