A Season Of Cliffhangers For Penn Men's Team by Rob Dinerman
Andrew Douglas (Penn), Ahmed Bayoumy (St Lawrence)
photos Penn Squash
Dateline February 14th
--- An era ended this past Sunday when the University of Pennsylvania's
men's and women's teams played against Columbia in the last home
matches that will ever be hosted by the Ringe Squash Courts, which have
had a noteworthy 59-year run --- including hosting several U. S.
Nationals and Potter Cup championships --- and are slated for
demolition this spring.
Columbia journeyed to Philadelphia knowing that by
winning it would clinch its first-ever men's Ivy League title. The
Lions got what they came for but were pushed to the limit before barely
emerging with a 5-4 victory that marked the fifth of Penn's seven Ivy
League dual meets that ended with a 5-4 tally. Never before in the
history of Penn men's squash have that many dual meets been decided by
a single match, and Penn's bare-margin trio of losses to Princeton,
Harvard and Columbia would all have been reversed (which would have
made for a 7-0 record and the Ivy League pennant) had a combined six
points instead landed in the Quaker column.
Against Princeton, Penn No. 7 Yash Barghava
led Abhimanyu Shah 10-9 in the fifth before yielding the final three
points; in the Harvard match, Penn No. 8 James Watson, trailing Bradley
Smith 10-4 in the fifth game, fended off five straight match-balls
against him and drew to 9-10 before Smith was able to finally garner
the clinching point; and in the Columbia match a few days ago, Penn No.
3 Marwan Mahmoud battled Columbia standout Seif Attiah right to the end
of their 11-8 fifth game. As it happens, the Penn women also lost 5-4
to Columbia when, in the last and deciding match between No. 5 players
Habiba Mohammed of Columbia and Penn sophomore Lindsay Stanley ---whose
father, Jeff, won the US Nationals 31 years ago in 1987, one of the
years that the event was held at Ringe --- Mohammed prevailed,
three games to love.
The Penn men's team's frenetic season also included
their being on the winning end of 5-4 matches with Yale (in which, with
the team score knotted at 4-all, Karim Tarek won the No. 4 match
against Pierson Broadwater) and Dartmouth. This latter outcome was
decided when Penn's No. 1 freshman star Andrew Douglas, a finalist in
the 2017 US National Championship, won 3-2 over Alvin Huemann, to whom
Douglas had lost when they played a few months ago in the preseason Ivy
Scrimmages this past autumn.
This pair of airtight victories, along with 9-0 shut-outs
against Cornell and Brown, enabled the Quakers to finish with a 4-3
league record and in a three-way tie with Princeton and Dartmouth for
third place in the Ivy League standings. The team has this weekend off
before the national men's college championship tournament, the Potter
Cup, will be played from February 23rd through 25th at Trinity College,
with the season-ending Individual Championships to follow one week
later in Washington DC. According to Penn men's head coach (and
four-time U. S. Nationals finalist) Gilly Lane, the Ivy League
currently is at its highest-ever level in terms of quality of play and
parity between the top six teams. Lane wryly expressed the hope that at
least some of the upcoming Potter Cup matches would be decided by
convincing margins, noting that, after a winter of 5-4 results
virtually every week, "I don't think my heart can handle any more of
them!"
