Princeton Edges Penn In Riveting Jadwin Gymnasium Swan Song by Rob Dinerman Dateline February 16, 2024
--- In a thrilling dual meet with historic overtones and a series of
twists and turns fully worthy of a Hollywood script, the Princeton
men’s team rang down the curtain on 55 years of squash at Jadwin
Gymnasium by defeating Penn 5-4 this past Sunday afternoon. In so doing the Tigers completed
a second consecutive season in which they went undefeated in their home
dual meets, earned a share of the Ivy League championship (with Penn)
for the first time in the 11 years since the legendary coach Bob
Callahan’s farewell 2012-13 season and staged perhaps the most dramatic
comeback in the program’s 93-year history as an official varsity sport.
When Jadwin Gymnasium opened in October 1969, the Daily Princetonian
proclaimed that it was “an engineering feat comparable to the
construction of the Great Pyramid.” It will make way for a
brand-new racquet-sports facility, the Racquet And Recreation Center
across from Lake Carnegie, which will open this coming autumn and
feature 14 squash courts as well as nine indoor and nine outdoor tennis
courts. Jadwin Gymnasium has borne witness to an incredible amount of
college squash history, and some of college squash’s most exciting and
important dual meets and postseason tournaments have occurred within
its confines, including riveting 5-4 final rounds of national team
championships in 1993 (Princeton men over Harvard), 2009 (Trinity men
over Princeton), 2012 (Princeton men over Trinity after trailing 4-2 in
the match that ended Trinity’s 13-year dynasty, at least temporarily)
and 2014 (Trinity women over Harvard). The Princeton men have had some
of their greatest triumphs and some of their most heartbreaking losses
--- as in 2009, when Princeton No. 1 Mauricio Sanchez led Trinity’s
Baset Chaudhry 5-0 in the deciding match of the 2009
national-team-championship final, only to lose the last nine points ---
at Jadwin. But never before this past Sunday had a Princeton team,
men’s or women’s, rallied to defeat an opponent (much less a favored opponent) after losing four of the first five completed matches.
The Quakers, who had gone undefeated in Ivy League play coming into
this dual meet, had lost only once all year, a road match against
Trinity in which the Bantams had surmounted a 3-0 deficit by winning
five straight matches. Princeton, by contrast, had followed a 6-3 home
win over Harvard in late January with a downbeat weekend in Connecticut
in which the Tigers had lost to both Trinity and Yale. In the
first of the two shifts, Penn got wins from its No. 7 Dana Santry
(3-0 over Hassan Khalil), its No. 5 Abdelrahman Dweek (3-1) over
Alastair Cho), its No. 3 Nick Spizzirri (3-1 over Thomas Rosini) and
its No. 2 Omar Hafez, who appeared to have dealt a fatal blow to
Princeton’s chances when he won four straight points after trailing
Hollis Robertson 10-8 in the fifth game in a match that lasted so
long (89 minutes) that, by the time it was over, Princeton No. 8 Zain
Ahmed had won his second-shift match in straight games over Rehan
Luthra.
Trailing at that stage four matches to one, Princeton drew closer by
getting wins at the Nos. 9 and 6 positions from Gordon Lam over Shaam
Gambhir and Avi Agarwal over Varun Chitturi respectively. The No.
4 match between Princeton’s Ahmed Wael and Nathan Tze Bing Kueh was an
82-minute war that Wael survived (after failing to convert two match
balls in regulation), 12-10 in the fifth, setting off a spectator
stampede to the main exhibition court, where Princeton No. 1 Karim
Elbarbary and his Penn counterpart Salman Khalil (no relation to
Hassan) were battling it out in the fourth game of what everyone
(including both players by then) knew had become the deciding match.
Khalil eked out the fourth game 11-9 and the two protagonists played
each other to a competitive standstill throughout the fifth as the
score seesawed hair-raisingly along. Elbarbary forged his way to a 10-8
lead but when he lost the ensuing point, it brought back memories of
the 10-8 lead that Elbarbary’s teammate Robertson had seen dissolve
into a 12-10 loss on that very same court in the immediately-preceding
match. The 10-9 point was lengthy and all-court, with each player
making at least one exceptional retrieval of a would-be winner. Finally
Khali attempted a forehand drop shot to the front-left that
bounded back at him for a stroke call, giving Elbarbary a climactic
11-7, 11-3, 3-00, 9-11, 11-9 victory, in the wake of which Khalil
collapsed to the floor (where he remained for a full minute) while
Elbarbary was mobbed by his delirious-with-joy teammates. Three of the
nine matches had been decided by two-point fifth-game margins --- both
Agarwal and Santry had won their respective close-out games by two
points as well --- as did the unofficial No. 10 match, in which Penn’s
Hao Cui edged Federico Sosa, 11-9 in the fifth. The last men’s dual
meet ever contested at Jadwin Gymnasium had come down to the last few
points of the last game of the last match, with possession of the
season’s Ivy League crown at stake, just as had happened 30 years
earlier in 1994, when the last college hardball season had come down to
the last point of the last game of the last match of that season’s last
dual meet, also with that year’s Ivy League title on the line, on which
Harvard’s Tal Ben-Shahar had edged Yale’s Jamie Dean, 18-17 in the
fifth, when Dean smashed Ben-Shahar’s serve into the tin on the final
exchange.
A few weeks earlier, in the same Jadwin Gymnasium venue, the women’s
Ivy League title had effectively been decided at 4-all with a
last-match-on-court denouement as well, in which Harvard No. 4 Lucie
Stefanoni defeated Princeton’s Charlotte Bell in four games. Both the
Penn and Princeton men --- as well as the men’s teams from Trinity
College, Harvard and Yale --- will be right in the hunt when the
national team championships are held during the first weekend in March,
as will be the case as well for the women’s teams representing
Princeton (which beat Penn 9-0 in the women’s dual meet after the
thrilling men’s matches ended), eight-time defending champion Harvard
and Trinity College, which had an undefeated dual-meet season in
2023-24. But, for sheer drama, quality of play, historic implications
and excitement, whatever happens in those upcoming tournaments will be
hard pressed to equal the rollercoaster that the Princeton and Penn
men’s teams rode this past Sunday afternoon.
Rob Dinerman recently completed A Century Of Champions: 100 Years Of College Squash,
which chronicles college squash from 1923-2023 and will be released
this evening at the Arlen Specter National Training Center.
