A Look Back At Harvard’s 5-4 Potter Cup Final-Round Win Over Penn by Rob Dinerman Dateline February 24, 2022
--- Culminating as dramatic a Potter Cup final as has ever been
contested in the 34-year history of the event, Harvard’s No. 6 player,
sophomore Ido Burstein, defeated Nathan Tze Bing Kueh by scores of
11-9, 2 and 5 to give Harvard a 5-4 victory over the University of
Pennsylvania at the Ringe Courts in Philadelphia this past Sunday
afternoon. The Quakers had recorded their first-ever undefeated regular
season (and first outright Ivy League title in the 53 years since the
1969 team had achieved the feat) in the history of Penn men’s squash,
including a home 6-3 dual-meet win over the Crimson in mid-January that
ended a 38-match Harvard winning streak. But in this rematch, this time
with the 2022 College Squash Association (CSA) men’s national team
championship on the line and with rematches at every position since the
lineups were exactly the same as they had been in the dual meet,
Harvard was able to flip three of their dual-meet losses (including
Burstein’s), compared to only one such reversal for Penn.
In the dual meet five weeks earlier, the Penn team had
convincingly demonstrated its superior depth by sweeping the Nos. 5
through 9 matches and getting a win as well at No. 2 from Aly Abou
Eleinen, who had overwhelmed over his Egyptian compatriot Marwan Tarek,
11-2 in the close-out fourth game. Penn’s dominance of the bottom half
of the lineup put extra pressure on the Harvard contingent, which
entered the contest --- after a pair of efficient pre-final wins over
Virginia and Columbia, a first-round upset winner over Trinity College
--- knowing that for the team to have a realistic chance of winning, it
would need a sweep of the top three positions and avoid a sweep down
below.
The Crimson cause became even more dire during the first wave of
matches when Penn’s Roger Alber Baddour, who all season had been
invincible at No. 9, throttled Conner Stoltz, while Baddour’s
teammates, two-time U. S. Nationals finalist Andrew Douglas and Nick
Spizzirri (the best player on Brunswick School teams that won
three-straight U. S. National High School Championships from 2018-20),
were leading Harvard’s No. 1 and 4 players, Victor Crouin and George
Crowne respectively, two games to love. An opening-wave Penn sweep
would for all intents and purposes have buried Harvard, and Spizzirri,
a straight-game loser to Crowne in the dual meet, wound up winning his
match, 11-7 in the fifth. But even though Crouin struggled mightily the
entire match against an opponent who had beaten him several times in
the past and was playing magnificently, he managed to find a way to
win, 12-10 in the fifth, in the process batting away two match balls
against him in the fourth game and one in the fifth to give his team a
win that at that vulnerable stage of the afternoon it absolutely had to
have.
So did the Crimson’s No. 7 player Liam Rotzoll, who had lost to
Yash Bhargava, 11-9 in the fifth, in the dual meet and this time beat
him by the same 11-9 fifth-game margin to give Harvard the
bottom-three-positions point that it knew coming in that it desperately
needed. The last few crucial points of that game were fascinating in a
morbid way, since both players were cramping, Rotzoll in his playing
hand (which he kept flapping between points in an effort to loosen the
fingers) and Bhargava in both legs. On the 10-9 point, Rotzoll hit a
shallow drive down the right wall that a nearly immobilized Bhargava
was unable to steer back into play.
Tied at two matches apiece, the two schools then split the
remaining pair of second-wave matches, with Penn No. 8 Saksham
Choudhary repeating his 3-0 dual-meet win over Tate Harms and Harvard
co-captain Sam Scherl doing the same to Penn No. 3 James Flynn. The
latter has come up with some big performances in the past --- he had
pulled off an opening-round Intercollegiate Individuals tournament win
over defending champion Crouin the last time that event was held in
2020 --- but in this match, Sam Scherl did what Sam Scherl has always
done throughout his last three undefeated seasons, i.e. relentlessly
grind his opponents into the floor, no fancy shots, just constant
offensive and defensive pressure that inevitably takes its toll. The
11-7, 5 and 9 tally represented Scherl’s 47th consecutive victory in
team match play, dating back to the last loss he sustained, at the
hands of Trinity’s Tom de Mulder in the final round of the 2018 Potter
Cup, which was also the last Harvard team loss in postseason
competition. Scherl thus ended his Harvard career with 58 wins (against
only three losses), which broke the previous record of 55 match wins
during the Mike Way coaching era (which began in the 2010-11 season)
that had been held by Tommy Mullaney ’14, a member of the first of
Coach Way’s four Potter Cup championship teams (also 2019, 2020 and now
2022).
With the teams now even at three matches each, Tarek and
Abou Eleinen, who had faced each other well over a dozen times during
their overlapping college careers (much more often than any other
head-to-head match-up in college squash during that time frame) went
onto the court that Scherl and Flynn had exited to begin a match that
deservedly was viewed as even money in light of the mixed results, the
last two of which, both in this same arena, had been the 2020
Individuals final --- in which Tarek, trailing two games to one and
behind early in both the fourth and fifth games, had engineered a 6-0
spurt from 4-5 to 10-5 to decide the fourth game and a match-ending 8-0
closing burst from 3-5 in the fifth --- and, as referenced, the 2022
dual meet, in which Abou Eleinen had run off and hid in the close-out
11-2 fourth game. That latter score had been an aberration in their
rivalry, which has otherwise been filled with close matches and close
games. Certainly no one could have possibly envisioned the degree to
which Tarek --- inspired by a “go get him” text he had received from
World No. 1 Ali Farag, Harvard Class of 2014 and someone who still,
even eight years post-graduation, bleeds Crimson red --- would put a
strangle-hold on the match from the very first point and not relinquish
it at any time in the 11-5, 5 and 4 blow-out that resulted.
At a time when Tarek was well along in his masterful
performance, Harvard appeared to be in the driver’s seat since his
teammate Adam Corcoran, who had won the first two games of his match
against Penn No. 5 Dillon Huang before losing the third, had taken a
7-4 lead in the fourth game, putting Harvard just four points away from
clinching the outcome. But Huang, who had rallied from two-love down to
overtake Corcoran in the dual meet, did so again this time as well,
winning 18 of the match’s last 23 points and taking the fifth game 11-4.
Due to how long that latter match had lasted, combined with how
swiftly Tarek had won his match, by the time that Burstein and Kueh
entered the court that Corcoran and Huang vacated, all eight of the
other evenly-divided matches had ended, a decided rarity in the current
CSA three-wave format. Kueh, as noted, had won his dual-meet match
against Burstein, but it had been very close: 10-12, 11-9, 12-10, 11-8.
Perhaps even more relevantly, Burstein had come through his two
pre-final matches fairly cleanly (with only one lost game), whereas
Kueh had played a pair of draining five-game matches and had surmounted
a two games to love deficit in his Saturday-afternoon match against
Yale’s Brian Leonard. He contested the first game of his match with
Burstein as hard as he could, but when he lost that game 11-9 (on a
Burstein backhand straight-drop winner), he had essentially shot his
bolt. After dropping the first two points of the second game, Burstein
ran off 11 straight and closed the match out strongly by winning the
last game 11-5.
By that time, he had quieted and subdued the previously
boisterous Penn crowd, which had been keenly anticipating what would
have been the first Penn men’s team triumph in the CSA postseason
tournament in the 48 years since the 1974 team led by Joe Swain and Gil
Mateer had achieved that result in the same Ringe Courts venue where
this past weekend’s tournament was played. Ironically, that 1974 team
had been galvanized and infuriated by a Daily Pennsylvanian article
written by Penn sophomore Buzzy Bissinger (of later Friday Night Lights
fame) that had castigated the players as “chokers” in the wake of their
dual-meet loss to Harvard. This time the gallery emptied out
quickly and quietly soon after the final ball --- a Burstein backhand
drive down the left wall that a deflated Kueh was unable to retrieve
--- had been hit.
The outcome represented Mission Accomplished for the
commitment demonstrated by the three Harvard seniors --- Scherl,
Corcoran and Fin Ong --- who were initially members of the Class of
2021 but took a gap year last year in order to try to win a third
consecutive Potter Cup title for Harvard men’s squash, which now has 34
overall national team championship on its ledger, double the 17 that
Trinity College, Harvard’s closest pursuer, has amassed. It also
secured the milestone 150th team national title in the history of
Harvard athletics, and was by any measure the highlight of Coach Mike
Way’s tenure as the coach of Harvard’s men’s and women’s teams. The
teams he has coached have now won 12 national championships --- eight
women’s titles and four men’s --- during his 12 years (11 actual
seasons, given the cancellation of the entire 2020-21 college schedule
due to Covid) at the helm, a record number for any college coach over
so compressed a time span, with a possible 13th beckoning this coming
weekend when Harvard’s women’s team, winners of a record six straight
Howe Cups (the women’s equivalent of the Potter Cup), go for Number
Seven in their home courts at Harvard’s Murr Center.
Beating a Penn team on their turf in front of their crowd in what
was supposed to finally be their year may have been, under the
circumstances, as praiseworthy a feat as has ever been achieved in the
resplendent history of Harvard squash. It was also a singular way of
marking 100 years since Harry Lee Cowles was hired (pursuant to a
directive issued by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell to Athletics
Director Henry Geer to improve Harvard’s athletics program) at the
outset of the 1922-23 season, during which, since intercollegiate
squash didn’t exist at the time, Harvard entered two teams in the
Boston squash leagues.
Crouin, though never at his scintillating best, somehow
found a way to win against a truly elite opponent who was at the top of
his game. Scherl delivered as he has all season, and, for that matter,
throughout his college career. Tarek was flawless, in the zone right
from the opening exchange and never giving his outstanding opponent a
moment of daylight. Rotzoll was able to fight his way through injury
and fatigue to give his team the one breakthrough win it knew it needed
that prevented Penn from sweeping the bottom third of the lineup.
Burstein’s name will now go down in Harvard-squash annals with that of
those --- ranging from John Francis, who ran off nine straight points
after trailing Yale’s Joey Holmes 11-6 in the fifth game of the
season-defining match 60 years ago in 1962, then went from 10-14 to
17-14 two years later against Princeton’s Cuthbert “Cuffy” Train, to
Tal Ben-Shahar, who rallied from triple-match-point-against to beat
Yale’s Jamie Dean in the deciding match of the 1994 season, to Tim
Wyant, who beat Trinity’s Zafi Levy in a last-match-on-court situation
in the 1997 Potter Cup final, to a host of others through the years ---
who came through in the crucible of having an entire season come down
to one for-all-the-marbles match. And Coach Way got his team to peak at
exactly the crucial time, when there was absolutely no margin for error
against a fearsome opponent, and when nothing short of every player
playing at his maximum would have been enough to bring the Potter Cup
permanent trophy back yet again to its familiar location in Cambridge.
Rob Dinerman has written two
Histories of Harvard Squash, the first, published in 2015, covering the
period from 1922-2010, and the most recent one, released this past
autumn, chronicling the Mike Way Coaching Era from 2010-21.
