2023 Howe Cup Recap: Three Flipped Matches Key Harvard’s Successful Title Defense by Rob Dinerman photo: Harvard Athletics / Christina Richson
Dateline February 22, 2023
--- Trailing 4-1 in the fifth game of a match in which she had led two
games to love and 10-8 (double-match-ball) in the fourth, Harvard No. 2
Saran Gregory-Nghiem determinedly reeled off a 10-3 match-closing run
against her Trinity College opponent Malak Kamal that jumpstarted the
underdog Crimson nine to an intense and dramatic 5-4 victory this past
Sunday afternoon in the final round of the 2023 Howe Cup, hosted this
year at the Ringe Courts at Penn. Gregory-Nghiem, who had lost in four
decisive games to Kamal in the mid-January dual meet between these two
schools --- in which the Bantams had invaded Harvard’s Murr Center and
delivered a 7-2 thrashing that peremptorily ended Harvard’s
all-time record 102-match winning streak --- was one of three Harvard
players who “flipped” the dual-meet outcome in this for-all-the-marbles
rematch, the others being Brecon Welch, who won the fourth and fifth
games of her match against Trinity No. 6 Lujan Palacios, reversing
their five-game prior result, and Amira Singh, who fended off a match
ball against her to win the fifth game 12-10 over Janna Ashmawy in the
No. 7 match.
The five-game victories by Gregory-Nghiem, Welch and Singh preceded
Habiba El Defrawy’s repeat 3-0 win over Trinity No. 3 Nouran Youssef
that gave Harvard a 4-3 lead and left it to Harvard No. 1 Marina
Stefanoni to provide the clinching fifth point with an impressive 11-6,
7 and 9 win over Jan Safy. Tied at 9-all in the last game, Stefanoni
got to match ball on a Safy tin and then rifled a forehand drive down
the right wall to perfect length past Safy (who appeared to be leaning
to her left, expecting a cross-court) for the close-out. Safy had
earned multiple match-ball opportunities in the third game of their
dual-meet encounter, but Stefanoni had escaped with that game 13-11 and
dominated the fourth and fifth to a degree (11-3, 11-0) that may have
had a psychological carry-over to this rematch five weeks later. With
the team result having been decided, Trinity’s No. 9 player Fabiola
Cebello was able to out-last Molly Stoltz, 11-6 in the fifth, to make
the final score 5-4.
Given the number of dual-meet results that had to be reversed in this
Howe Cup final, and the rivetingly airtight fashion in which those
reversals were achieved, this must go down as one of the greatest
moments in the resplendent history of Harvard squash, and it gave the
Crimson its record-shattering eighth consecutive Howe Cup (the previous
record had been five, set by the Harvard teams coached by Bill Doyle
from 1993-97), dating back to its 5-4 loss to Trinity in the 2014 Howe
Cup final. It marked Harvard’s 22nd Howe Cup crown overall (also a
record by a wide margin), and constituted the second year in a row that
a Harvard team had avenged a dual-meet loss by winning the
national-championship final, preceded by Harvard’s men’s team’s 2022
Potter Cup final-round victory (also at Ringe) over a Penn team that
had won the dual meet 6-3.
The comeback wins by Gregory-Nghiem (all the more praiseworthy in light
of her being a freshman) and Welch were especially important because
they occurred in the first shift of matches (there were three shifts of
three matches each) and were needed to counter-balance the fact that
Trinity had taken a quick 1-0 lead on the strength of the win by its
No. 8 player Kara Lincou (the niece of former PSA No. 1 Thierry Lincou)
over Binney Huffman. Trailing two matches to one, Bantam No. 5
Madeleine Hylland evened the team score at 2-all with a straight-game
win over Evie Coxon, but El Defrawy and Singh gave the Crimson a 4-2
lead after the second shift. Trinity’s Hannah Chukwu then won over
Serena Daniel in the No. 4 match, but by that time Stefanoni had taken
a two-games-to-love lead over Safy. The latter then led 6-1 in the
third game, briefly raising hopes in the Trinity camp of a comeback
victory, since at that stage Cebello had won the first two games of her
match with Stoltz. But, just as her teammate Gregory-Nghiem had done on
the same court a little over an hour earlier, Stefanoni conjured up a
10-3 spurt to the finish line, after which she was mobbed by her
teammates in a joyous group celebration.
In some ways this titanic battle between by far the two best women’s
college squash teams in the land was even closer than the very-close
score, with each of the three flipped matches having a crisis moment.
Gregory-Nghiem, as noted, fell behind early in the fifth game against
Kamal, who seemed to have all the momentum at that 4-1 stage before the
play turned back in Gregory-Nghiem’s direction. After losing the second
and third games of her match with Palacios, Welch --- whose mother,
Libby Eynon Welch, played on three Howe Cup championship teams and won
the Intercollegiate Individuals as a senior in 1995 --- led 8-5 in the
fourth but then surrendered four straight points, leaving her behind
8-9, only two points from defeat, before she rescued that game 11-9 and
raced out to an 8-1 lead en route to 11-3 in the fifth. And Singh also
saw a substantial mid-game lead (7-2 in the fifth in her case)
disappear against Ashmawy, who eventually led 10-9 before dropping the
final three points --- so between the Welch-Palacios and Singh-Ashmawy
matches, Trinity was a combined three points from sweeping both matches instead of being swept
in them. These teams were so closely matched that ultimately Harvard’s
championship DNA might have been the deciding factor, as Trinity’s
longtime coach Wendy Bartlett alluded to in her post-match comments
when she cited the degree to which, “Harvard came out today with the
attitude that they weren’t going to lose, and that’s what I expected
from a team that has so much experience winning this tournament. They
know how to handle the pressure and they know how to pace themselves
through the weekend. They were better than we were today.”
There were milestones everywhere one looked throughout the tournament,
which was held on the 100th-anniversary weekend of the first-ever
college match (a 4-1 victory by Harvard’s men’s team over Yale at the
Racquet & Tennis Club in midtown Manhattan during the third weekend
of February in 1923). This was also the 50th anniversary of the college
Howe Cup, which debuted in 1973, and the outcome represented the 10th
Howe Cup crown in 12 attempts for Harvard head coach Mike Way, whose
tenure began with the 2010-11 season, the only season during his time
at the helm in which Harvard didn’t win either the Howe Cup or the
Potter Cup. In each of the last three college squash seasons ---
2018-19, 2019-20 and 2021-22, since the 2020-21 season was canceled due
to the pandemic --- Harvard men’s and women’s teams have achieved a
Howe/Potter Cup “double” and the Crimson men, coming off an undefeated
dual-meet season, will be seeded first when the Potter Cup is contested
this coming weekend at Trinity College. Last, 2022-23 was also the 10th
straight year that the Harvard coaching staff --- consisting of Head
Coach Way, Associate Head Coach Hameed Ahmed, Assistant
Coach/Recruiting Coordinator Luke Hammond and Assistant Coach/Fitness
Beth Zeitlin --- has remained intact, a level of stability and
continuity whose importance in perpetuating the program’s success is
often overlooked but exceedingly substantial.
***
Rob Dinerman has covered college squash extensively for more than two
decades and he is the author of A History Of Harvard Squash, 1922-2010
and A History Of Harvard Squash During The Mike Way Coaching Era (2010-21).
