Potter Cup Preview: Trinity, Ivy Champ Columbia Seeded Nos. 1 and 2, Yale Fails To Qualify    
by Rob Dinerman

Dateline February 20th --- A dual-meet season that had more than its fair share of 5-4 tallies and surprising results will culminate this weekend in Hartford, where the top-seeded reigning title-holder Trinity College will host the Potter Cup tournament between the top-eight-ranked schools to determine the men’s national team champion for 2017-18.  The Bantams, who went undefeated during the regular season and have captured 16 of the past 19 editions of this event, are slated to begin their attempted title defense Friday afternoon against a rejuvenated Princeton contingent whose return to the Potter Cup after a four-year hiatus was one of this winter’s feel-good stories.

  So too was the strong play of the University of Pennsylvania squad, which finished tied with Princeton and Dartmouth for third place in the Ivy League (at 4-3) but which lost three 5-4 matches --- to Princeton, Harvard and Columbia --- by a combined six points.  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 mid-February dual meet against Columbia (the last match ever to be held at the Ringe Squash Courts, which will be demolished this spring after a 59-year run), Penn No. 3 Marwan Mahmoud battled Columbia standout Seif Attiah right to the end of their 11-8 fifth game. By emerging victorious, albeit barely, the Lions, led by their senior captain and reigning Individuals champion Osama Khalifa, clinched their first-ever Ivy League pennant.

  Penn’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. The fact that five of Penn’s seven Ivy League matches were decided by 5-4 scores --- and that, had those six points instead landed in the Quaker column, they would have been 7-0 and won the Ivies --- points up how closely matched the league has become. Penn will take on No. 3 seed Harvard in the first round, with the winner to then play whoever triumphs between No. 2 seed Columbia and No. 7 Rochester.

A potential semifinals rematch between Columbia and Harvard would be something special in the aftermath of their mid-January dual meet in New York that essentially decided the Ivy League title, in which five of the nine matches were decided by two-point margins in the last game, including the final match on court, where, with the team score tied at four matches apiece, Khalifa eked out an 11-9 fifth-game win over Crimson No. 1 Saadeldin Abouaish. Harvard and its dynamic coach Mike Way is seeking a men’s/women’s “double” in the wake of the manner in which its women’s team dominated the Howe Cup this past weekend with a trio of 9-0 scores over, sequentially, Cornell, Yale and Trinity.

   In the draw’s top half, the Trinity-Princeton victor will then meet whoever wins the No. 4 vs. 5 match-up between St. Lawrence and Dartmouth. In Trinity’s 5-4 late-January road win over St. Lawrence, the Saints, playing without two members of their top nine, nevertheless swept the top three slots. With their full cast of starters now restored to health, they come into the weekend as formidable contenders.

   For the first time in the 29 years since the inception of the Potter Cup competition in 1989, Yale failed to qualify for the tournament and instead will play in the Hoehn Cup for teams ranked Nos. 9 though 16. Coach Dave Talbott’s troops suffered through a midseason five-match losing streak that dropped them out of the top eight, and their season-ending 6-3 loss to Dartmouth, their school-record eighth setback of the season, doomed their last hope of making it into the top flight. The quality of play and degree of parity among the top teams is at an all-time high --- as witness the fact that no school has won this tournament twice in a row since 2011 --- and at this stage a few unsuccessful recruiting bids and a handful of close defeats can have a substantial impact on a team’s standing within the sport.