100-Year Anniversary Of College Squash Will Happen This Weekend by Rob Dinerman Dateline February 17, 2023
--- When the Howe Cup competition to determine the 2023 women's college
national team championship is held at the Ringe Courts at the
University of Pennsylvania starting later today, it will be contested
against a two-part historical backdrop. It will mark the 50th
anniversary of the inaugural college Howe Cup in 1973. And it was
during the third weekend of February 100 years ago in 1923 that the
first-ever college match took place between Harvard and Yale at the
Racquet & Tennis Club when Harvard's first-year coach Harry Cowles
and his players journeyed to midtown Manhattan to face off on
successive days against the host club's A team and a contingent from
Yale, which was also fielding a squash team for the very first time.
Harvard defeated Racquet & Tennis 5-0 and Yale 4-1. Both matches
were classified as “informal” in the sparse (three short paragraphs) Harvard Crimson
write-up (see link below), which commended Harvard sophomore Palmer
Dixon for having defeated Henry Harper, the newly-crowned New York City
squash champion, and noted that Harvard’s only loss of the day was to
Yale’s L. E. Williams, who at the time was the reigning intercollegiate
lawn tennis champion. For the next five years, Yale-Harvard remained
the only college match, with Harvard triumphing each time, until the
University of Pennsylvania team played its first-ever college match in
late February 1929, suffering a shut-out at Harvard’s hands.
College squash has grown into a colossus --- currently fielding 86
men's teams and 50 women's teams playing in multiple competitive
categories under the banner of the College Squash Association (CSA) ---
following that low-key debut during this upcoming weekend exactly a
century ago. The CSA will be marking this milestone in several
different ways during the next few months, culminating in a gala
celebration at the Specter Center currently planned for March 2024.
