Dave Talbott, June 18, 1952-September 19, 2023, Yale Head Squash Coach For 38 Years By Rob Dinerman Dateline September 20, 2023
--- DSR is sad to report the passing yesterday morning of Dave Talbott,
71, Yale’s head squash coach from 1983-2021, due to an apparent heart
attack that he suffered very shortly after Ann Talbott, Dave’s wife of
more than 40 years, died this past Sunday after a long illness.
Talbott’s 38 years as head coach of Yale’s men’s team --- during the
last 17 of which he served as the head coach of the Yale’s women’s team
as well --- furthered a Talbott extended-family connection to Yale
University that goes back more than a century. His grandfather,
Nelson Trowbridge Talbott Sr., better known as Bud, Yale Class of 1914,
was an All-American offensive tackle and team captain during Yale’s
first season in the Yale Bowl, and Dave’s father and uncle were Yalies
as well. Mark Talbott, Dave’s youngest brother and the dominant player
on the World Professional Squash Association (WPSA) hardball tour for a
full decade beginning in the early 1980’s, later coached the Yale
women’s squash team throughout the six-year period from 1998-2004 in a
run that culminated when the team went wire-to-wire undefeated during
his last season and brought the Howe Cup (emblematic of the women’s
national collegiate team championship) back to Yale after a 12-year
hiatus with a thrilling 5-4 final-round victory over Trinity College,
the two-time defending Howe Cup champion
Born on June 18, 1952, Dave Talbott grew up in Dayton, Ohio, in a house
that had a tennis court on the property and a hardball squash court in
the basement. One had to go through a room in the house’s lower level
called The Cabin that had stuffed animals and muskets hanging from the
walls, then climb down a ladder with a pulley to enter the court and
push the ladder back up so that it wouldn’t interfere with the play. He
was a finalist in the 1969 New England Interscholastic Championships
during a two-year stint at Deerfield Academy that was highlighted
by an 18-17 fifth-game win in the dual meet with Exeter against Dave
Fish, who as Harvard’s squash coach from 1976-89 would be Talbott’s
opposite number during six years’ worth of Harvard-Yale squash
match-ups. In the years that followed, Talbott was the head squash pro
at some top-echelon private clubs and played with distinction for
several years on the WPSA tour (earning a top-15 ranking and scoring
several wins over players in the top 10), which he served as secretary
and later as pro tour coordinator during the vital early-1980’s period
in that Association’s development.
Appointed the successor to outgoing coach Steve Gurney in August 1983,
just a few weeks before the fall semester began, Talbott left his
position as head pro at the Detroit Athletic Club after five enjoyable
years there to launch what the Yale Athletic Department hoped would be
a resurgence of the program, which had not won an Intercollegiate team
championship since 1961, when the Elis had had their last undefeated
season and conquered Harvard for the final time. Realizing from very
early on that there was a need to enhance Yale’s heretofore understated
profile on the squash map, Talbott immediately in the fall of 1983
inaugurated the Yale Open as an early-season tournament on the USSRA
schedule that would bring highly ranked players to Payne Whitney and
give his own varsity valuable match experience against them. Talbott
also arranged to have Yale host a WPSA ranking tourney for several
years as part of the Yale Open weekend, and he and Gurney oversaw a
renovation and expansion of the courts, by the end of which Yale had
arguably the premier squash facility in the nation. His own well-known
prowess as a solid WPSA player benefited him in this undertaking, as
did his engaging personality and Mark’s growing fame.
By the third season of Talbott’s tenure, his efforts had begun to show
some genuine signs of the glory that awaited the program he was
heading. Yale went 11-3 during that 1985-86 season, whose foremost
feature was the remarkable mid-season surge of senior Hugh Labossier,
the Yale captain that year, who defeated Jeff Stanley and Kenton
Jernigan, the No. 1 players at archrivals Princeton and Harvard
respectively, in the semis and final of the U.S. Nationals at the
University Club Of New York to thereby become the first-ever Yalie to
win this championship while still an undergraduate.
Three years later the Bulldogs, paced by sophomore No. 1 John Musto and
a host of talented upperclassmen, finished in a three-way tie for first
place in the Ivy League and --- having won 7-2 over a Princeton
team that had already beaten Harvard 8-1 --- would have been outright
1989 Ivy League champions for the first time since 1961 had they not
suffered a 6-3 road loss to a Harvard team that was inspired by the
prospect of giving Dave Fish a final victory in the last dual meet of
his squash coaching career. (Fish would remain in Cambridge as the
Crimson tennis coach until finally retiring in 2018 after 42 years in
that role.)
The Yale players responded to this setback by battering Harvard 7-2
only a few days later in the semis of the inaugural edition of the
Potter Cup (an elimination tournament among the top-eight-ranked teams
to determine the men’s national team champion) held at Yale, then
topped Princeton by the same score in the final. The 1989-90 team, led
by Musto and five seniors (captain Cyrus Mehta, Alex Dean, Jim “Tuffy”
Kingsbury, Jeff Hoerle and Chris Hunt), recorded the only wire-to-wire
undefeated season compiled by a Yale men’s squash team in the 62-year
period since 1961.
Their spotless performance was highlighted by a pair of closely-spaced
(during a four-day period) 5-4 dual-meet and Potter Cup final-round
victories over Harvard in which sophomore Garrett Frank saved
triple-match-point against him at a time when Harvard had already
notched four team points in the Potter Cup and Musto overcame imposing
late-match deficits in both of his matches with Harvard No. 1 Mark
Baker. The undisputed champions were feted at a victory party hosted
that spring by the Yale Club Of New York, whose A team (on which Tom
Clayton, Yale’s captain one year earlier, played an important role) had
just gone undefeated in the highly competitive MSRA A League as well.
All five varsity members from the senior class of 1990 were named
co-recipients of the Skillman Cup, a kind of season-end MVP award,
which had never previously been bestowed on more than one person, in
recognition of the enormous contribution they had made, both
individually and as a quintet, to the storied tradition of Yale squash.
And Talbott, who had waited seven years to drink championship
champagne, celebrated this coaching accomplishment that spring by
winning the WPSA Legends (35-and-over) title at the Winter Garden in
New York, defeating Sharif Khan in the semis and Charlie Khan in the
final, in each case in convincing fashion. Overall, during the period
from 1987-94, the last seven years in which intercollegiate squash was
played with the hardball, the Elis compiled a staggering record of
108-9, were 17-0 in 1989-90 and had three other seasons (’89, ’92 and
’94) in which their only loss was to Harvard.
It took a number of transitional years for Yale to acquire both the
facilities and players to again become a contending team in the wake of
the switch to softball, but two major expansions --- spearheaded
sequentially during the late 1990’s by Theodore P. Shen ’66 and
Nicholas F. Brady, captain of Yale’s intercollegiate champion 1951-52
squash team and later Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Ronald
Reagan and the senior George Bush --- resulted in the impressive
presence of 15 top-of-the-line international courts, including one
four-glass-wall court, two three-glass-wall courts and 12
glass-back-wall courts. The arrival in September 2002 of Julian
Illingworth --- a two-time US National Junior champion whose sparkling
Yale career would include an advance to the 2005 US Intercollegiate
final and the first two of a record-shattering EIGHT consecutive
US National Championships during his junior and senior years --- keyed
a Yale resurgence during the first decade of the 2000’s that was
highlighted by a three-way tie for first place in 2006 and the outright
Ivy League pennant in 2010, following which Yale advanced to its first
Potter Cup final since the 1990 championship run.
Also during that decade, as noted, Mark Talbott led the Yale women’s
team to the 2004 Howe Cup championship when freshman Kate Rapisarda
outlasted Trinity College’s Fernanda Rocha to give the Elis their
clinching fifth point. When Mark Talbott then decamped for the west
coast, Dave Talbott became the coach of both the men’s and women’s
teams (a double-role he has held ever since) and the Yale women’s team,
led by Michelle Quibell (the Intercollegiate Individual champion in
2004 and 2005) and her fellow 2006 classmate Amy Gross, ran off
successful Howe Cup defenses in both 2005 and 2006. Fittingly, Quibell
and Gross finished off their matches almost simultaneously after
Trinity College had taken a 4-3 lead in the 2006 final. Later that
year, Dave Talbott was awarded the prestigious President’s Cup by U.S.
Squash (the renamed version of the USSRA) “to the person who has made
substantial, sustained and significant contributions to the game of
squash,” which had been bestowed on Mark Talbott 17 years earlier in
1989, marking the only time that two members of the same family have
received this award.
Five years later, in 2011, Yale squash almost achieved a Potter/Howe
Cup “double” when the women’s team capped off an undefeated campaign
with a 5-4 final-round Howe Cup win over Harvard (with freshman
Kimberley Hay winning the deciding match over Harvard No. 4 June Tiong)
and the Yale men’s team led Trinity College, the reigning 12-time
defending champions, four matches to two in the Potter Cup final. After
Trinity had tied the score, the national championship also came down to
the No. 4 match between Yale’s Richard Dodd and Trinity’s Chris Binnie,
who prevailed in four games, the first three of which were all decided
by 11-9 scores.
The following year, Yale ended a Trinity consecutive-matches-won streak
that had swollen to an incredible 252 straight, but injuries befell the
Yalies during the next few weeks, resulting in a rare first-round
elimination in that year’s Potter Cup tournament. But one student
generation later, Talbott’s troops stormed undefeated through the Ivy
League schedule and avenged a 5-4 regular-season loss to Rochester by
edging the Yellow Jackets (semis winners over Trinity) 5-4 in the
Potter Cup final when Yale No. 4 Kah Wah Cheong outplayed Tomotaka
Endo, 11-8 in the fourth, in the last match on court, reversing their
dual-meet result six weeks earlier. Yale’s superior depth that day
resulted in five wins in the Nos. 4-9 slots that nullified Rochester’s
sweep of the top three positions.
During Talbott’s tenure at Yale, both Miranda Ranieri and Millie
Tomlinson (in 2008 and 2011 respectively) joined Quibell as
Intercollegiate Individual champions; the men’s team won the College
Squash Association (CSA) team sportsmanship award in 1986, 1989
and 1994; four of his players (Labossier in 1986, Roger Arjoon in 1995,
Nikhil Bhandare in 1999 and Spencer Lovejoy in 2020) won the Skillman
Award, the main men’s senior award for sportsmanship combined with a
high level of play; and six of his players (Frances Ho, Quibell,
Catherine MacLeod and Ranieri from 2005-08, along with Alia Aziz in
2010 and Logan Greer in 2011), won the Betty Richey Award, the women’s
counterpart to the Skillman Award. The four-straight Betty Richey run
is a record with room to spare, since no other school has had winners
of this award more than two years in a row.
Talbott’s teams were noteworthy both for the good sportsmanship
implicit in all those Skillman and Richey selections and for truly
being TEAMS; anyone who was around Yale squads during any portion of
his prolonged tenure came away from that exposure profoundly impressed
by the level of camaraderie that existed among its members, and several
opposing coaches cited the degree to which this quality caused Yale’s
teams to have a whole that was much more than the sum of its parts.
Talbott also played a major role in the growth of Squash Haven, New
Haven’s urban youth organization under the Squash & Education
aegis, whose student-athletes have used Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium
squash courts and whose mission Talbott has supported since Squash
Haven’s inception in 2007.
Talbott and Quibell were both inducted into the CSA Hall of Fame in the
same ceremony in the spring of 2019. All in all, Talbott-coached Yale
teams won a total of three Potter Cups (1989, 1990 and 2016), six men’s
Ivy League pennants (1989, 1990, 2006, 2010, 2011 and 2016), four of
them outright and two shared, three Howe Cups (2005, 2006 and 2011) and
women’s Ivy League titles in 2005 and 2011. In the wake of
Talbott’s retirement announcement, Victoria Chun, Yale’s Director of
Athletics, praised him for leaving “an indelible mark of countless
student-athletes that have come through the Brady Squash Center,” and
declared, “Dave has built two storied programs that will continue to
have success, but we will miss his enthusiasm, energy and ability to
bring out the best in those he is around."
