A Few Contrasting Thoughts About This Past Weekend's Results   
By Rob Dinerman

Dateline March 3rd ---- The college and hardball singles seasons both concluded in noteworthy fashion this past weekend, with Amanda Sobhy culminating her undefeated four-year college career at Harvard with a fourth straight Intercollegiate Individuals title, Ahmed Abdel Khalek staging a stirring rally from the brink of defeat to become the first player from Bates College ever to win the men's crown, and Mohamed Reda becoming the second player in as many years (preceded by Julian Illingworth in 2014) to win the U. S. Hardball Nationals after never having played hardball squash prior to the week of the tournament.

   At the Individuals, held at Jadwin Gymnasium in Princeton, in a compelling sign of the degree to which what is happening throughout the squash world is also impacting the American intercollegiate level, both men's finalists, Ahmed Abdel Khalek of Bates (who trailed two games to love before eking out an 11-9 third game en route to his five-game win) and Osama Khalifa of Columbia, are Egyptian, as is the women's runner-up Kanzy El Defrawy of Trinity College, who won the first game of her Sobhy final and earned a slight lead midway through the second before the Crimson superstar (whose father, Khaled Sobhy, is ALSO Egyptian) rallied to her four-game victory. Sobhy thereby equaled Gail Ramsay's accomplishment (from 1977-80) as the only women to win the Individuals all four years; Princeton's Yasser El Halaby is the only man to have won four straight Individuals, conquering four different opponents --- Will Evans in 2003, Will Broadbent in '04, Illingworth in '05 and Sid Suchde in '06 --- during his mid-2000's run.

    But El Halaby lost several dual-meet matches, including one, in which he had a third-game match-ball, that cost his team what would have been a huge win over Trinity in 2006, and Ramsay attended Penn State, which didn't have a formal squash team, whereas Sobhy went undefeated in dual meet, Howe Cup and Individuals competition throughout her four-year career, compiling a 62-0 record overall.* Also undefeated as collegians were Michael Desaulniers (1977-80) and Alicia McConnell (1982-85), both of whom handily won all three Individuals which they entered; Harvard star Desaulniers missed the event his junior year due to a stress fracture in his right foot, and McConnell turned pro prior to her senior year at Penn and hence wasn't eligible to play intercollegiate squash that year.

   If the Individuals weekend demonstrated the depth and vibrancy of the college game (as does the fact that Trinity's national-champion men's team didn't have even one first-team all-American), the U. S. Hardball Nationals, held at the Merion Cricket Club in suburban Philadelphia, was yet another dispiriting reminder of how far what for decades had been a truly magnificent event has fallen, despite the valiant and praiseworthy efforts of its aficionados to re-energize it. With few hardball courts remaining, most players were forced to adjust “on the fly” after a winter of playing either doubles or softball singles or hardball on softball courts, and this contingency, combined with dead spots on the floors and the inconsistent performance and erratic bounces of the fuchsia hardball, led to cheap winners all over the place and short, spasmodic points. Other than the 16-player Open division, which offered several thousand dollars in prize money, five of the six competitive categories, (which had a combined total of only 30 players) had to be run as round-robins, and three of them (the 75's, 80's and a women's division) had only three entrants apiece. A draw for players in their 20’s had been planned, but it was cancelled after only one person signed up for that flight.

   Ted Marmor had completed his tournament schedule and won the 75's flight by 10:30 Saturday morning; Charlie Baker won the 80's by playing one match Friday afternoon and another match Sunday morning (having not played at all on Saturday); and the women's tourney, won by 1981 Yale captain Tracy Ball Greer, was almost a "secret event," conjured up with such little notice that there wasn't even a posted draw, nor is it referenced on the U. S. Squash web site, and the last of the three matches on the schedule, between the two women Greer vanquished, hasn’t even been played yet as of this Tuesday evening writing and will likely be contested later this week. Gary Yeager earned the 60's championship, rising superior to that nine-man field and justifying his No. 1 seeding; Jim Zug Sr. took a competitive though straight-set 70’s final over Eric Berger; and Tom Harrity successfully defended his 50's title, beating 2011 50's winner Bryce Harding in the final after Zug, Berger, Harrity and Harding had all strode unscathed through their respective three-person pre-final pools.

   Harrity and his late-1980's WPSA hardball singles tour colleague Alan Grant, who also spent the weekend partnering up with his wife, Kat, in the concomitant Merion Mixed doubles tourney, both attained the semifinals of the Open draw, there to lose to Reda and Hamed Anvari respectively, with Reda, an assistant pro at Merion who only started hitting a hardball singles ball early last week but whose athleticism and energy serves him well on the PSA singles circuit, then edging Anvari in an exciting and high-quality four-game final. Illingworth, who moved from New York (where the 2014 Nationals was held) to his native Portland last summer, didn't attempt to defend his title, and Chris Walker, who won the 2013 event with a 15-13 fifth-game final-round tally over Anvari, has been bothered by hip inflammation that has sidelined him from competition for the past several months.


* Thanks to Michael Bello, Executive Administrator of the College Squash Association, for the statistical support that he provided for the intercollegiate-squash portion of this article.