Harvard Celebrates 2022-23 Potter/Howe Cup Championships At Season-Ending Banquet by Rob Dinerman Dateline April 3, 2023
--- The Harvard squash program celebrated a truly banner 2022-23 season
this past Friday evening at the Murr Center. Eighty attendees,
consisting of the members of both the national championship men’s and
women’s teams, along with coaches, parents and other contributors to
the program, were treated to an extraordinary buffet dinner along with
the speeches by the outgoing seniors and their respective “presenters”
among their teammates.
To say that there was plenty to celebrate
would be an immense understatement. Harvard’s men’s and women’s teams
both won the national team championships this past winter, in each case
by incredibly narrow margins in their respective final-round matches
against Trinity College. Indeed, there may never have been a Howe
Cup/Potter Cup sequence in which both finals were as exciting, and the
margin of victory as narrow, as happened in 2023. Four of the nine
matches in the Potter Cup final went to a fifth game, the scores of
three of those fifth games were 11-9, one other match (Abdelrahman
Nassar’s 13-11 fourth-game win over Harvard’s George Crowne) ended with
a two-point close-out game as well, and, perhaps most significantly of
all, in two of Harvard’s wins, its player had to save at least one
match ball against him.
Similarly, Harvard’s women’s team members
had to “flip” three of the matches they had lost in their 7-2 dual-meet
loss to Trinity (which ended a record 102 consecutive wins for the
Harvard women dating back eight years) in January, and all three of
those matches went five games, with one of those fifth games having to
be resolved in a 12-10 tiebreaker and another coming after the Harvard
player had fallen behind two games to one. It is therefore fully
understandable that Coach Way, who has guided the Harvard squash teams
ever since taking the reins prior to the 2010-11 season, labeled the
2022-23 season “the most exciting college squash season in my entire
coaching career.” It marked a record-tying fourth season in a row that
Harvard has recorded this national team championship “double” (matching
the mark that Harvard teams established from 1993-94 through 1996-97)
and constituted the record eighth straight season in which Harvard’s
women’s team has won the Howe Cup and the 11th season in a row that
Harvard has won either the Howe Cup or the Potter Cup or (as has
happened in each of the past four seasons) both.
In addition, Harvard men’s team co-captains
Crowne and Marwan Tarek each had distinctive achievements in recent
weeks that ended their college careers in memorable fashion. Crowne
posted a trio of upset wins over higher-seeded opponents to advance all
the way to the final round of the Individuals, while Tarek, who won the
deciding match in the Potter Cup finals over his Trinity opponent (and
winner of the Individuals one week later) Mohamed Sharaf, received the
prestigious John Skillman Award “given annually to a senior men’s
squash player who has demonstrated outstanding sportsmanship during his
entire college career while maintaining a high level of play.” He was
notified of his selection this past Wednesday evening, just a few hours
before sustaining a suspected right ankle fracture in a pick-up soccer
game at 10:30pm that caused him to show up at the banquet with his
lower right leg encased in a boot-cast. Both Crowne and Tarek were
named first-team All-Americans, as was Marina Stefanoni, the No. 1
player on Harvard’s women’s team (and the winner of the deciding match
in the Howe Cup final against Jan Safy). Ido Burstein (a Potter Cup
hero for the second year in a row for his match-ball-saving comeback
win over Trinity’s Joachim Chuah), Serena Daniel and Habiba El Defrawy
were named second-team All-Americans.
Stefanoni and El Defrawy shared the women’s
team MVP Award, whose men’s counterpart went to Tarek. Tate Harms, who
saved multiple match balls against him in 5-4 Crimson wins both in the
dual meet against Penn and the Potter Cup final against Trinity, and
Binney Huffman received the respective Most Improved Player Awards. The
co-captains-elect were Burstein and Harms for the men and Stefanoni and
Daniel for the women. At Harvard, the award winners and captaincies are
voted on by the team members. The returning letter-winners and the crop
of freshmen who join them next September will be charged with
continuing a tradition that has accounted for 35 men’s and 22 women’s
national team championships in this, the 100th-anniversary year of its
distinguished existence.
