Assaiante To Coach USA Men’s Team In World Championships
By Rob Dinerman
Dateline August 18th ---- Dailysquashreport.com has learned that Director of the U. S. SQUASH Elite Teams Program Paul Assaiante, whose Trinity College teams are reigning 13-time Potter Cup champions as the best college team in the land, will coach the USA Men’s Team that will compete in Germany in the biennial World Team Championships that begin next week. Assaiante will be pinch-hitting for USA Men’s Coach Chris Walker, who is recovering from a recent injury. Ironically, 10 years ago, when this tournament was held in Australia, Assaiante himself, who was the USA Head Coach at the time, was prevented from making the long trip after incurring a severe back injury that required surgery.
The team he will be leading into next week’s event is seeded eighth and is unquestionably the best squad that the Americans can field, composed of all four semifinalists in the S. L. Green U. S. Championships that were held this past April. Julian Illingworth, winner of the S. L. Green for the past seven consecutive years, who is ranked just outside the PSA top-30, will be accompanied by S. L. Green finalist for the past three years Gilly Lane, 2008 S. L. Green finalist Christopher Gordon and Princeton star Todd Harrity, who pushed Illingworth to a fifth game in an S. L. Green semi just weeks after becoming the first American-born winner of the U. S. Intercollegiate Individuals in 21 years when he roared through that event without dropping a single game. The team is well positioned to get through its round-robin Playoff in the Pools portion of the tournament and quite possibly to match or even exceed the USA’s best-ever seventh-place finish of 1981 (when Ned Edwards, Stu Goldstein, Bill Andruss and Ted Gross posted a wonderful performance in Sweden), especially if Lane is back to his best form after the lower-back injury he incurred earlier this summer. The players have already arrived in Germany, with Assaiante scheduled to fly overseas to join them tomorrow.
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