USSRA Five-Man Team Championships Cancelled By Rob Dinerman
Dateline January 8, 2004---This
weekend’s national five-man team championships, formerly an
enormously popular tournament and the site just last season of one of
the most noteworthy outcomes of the entire 2002-2003 USSRA schedule,
has been cancelled due to insufficient entries. An attempt will be made
to run the event in December, which would thereby still have it occur
in calendar 2004, but even if that happens, the current season will
have come and gone without this tourney being held.
This cancellation is a discomforting follow-up
to this past autumn’s Howe Cup, the counterpart team tournament
for women, which DID come off as scheduled in Seattle but was plagued
by a paucity of entries, the absence of a number of teams from regions,
especially in the eastern states, that have historically always fielded
entries a series of complaints during and after the weekend from
players who did not feel that they had received their
“value” for the hefty entry fee and the travel and lodging
expenses they had incurred.
This set of unsettling developments is in
marked contrast to the decades of enthusiastic participation that the
Five-Man Team Championship had enjoyed, particularly during the
hardball glory days of the 1960’s 1970’s and 1980’s,
when if anything the tournament was OVER-subscribed, even though
throughout that time it occurred simultaneously and concomitantly with
the National Singles tournament, which of course siphoned off the elite
U. S. players, since no one was allowed to play in both the individual
and team events.
Nonetheless, the desire of players
throughout the country to represent their regional association, college
or club team, city, even family (there were a few family entries, the
most successful of which, the Foster family, was led by 1951
Intercollegiate Individual champion Henry Foster) was such that many
team entries had to arrange a lengthy and spirited series of challenge
matches in the preceding months to determine their composition. And
there were a number of occasions, such when former (’67)
North American Open champion Ralph Howe edged out future (’87)
WPSA Apawamis and Chicago finalist Juan Mendez by one point in the
fifth game of the last and deciding match of the New York vs. Mexico
Team Championship Final in 1980 at Jadwin Gymnasium in Princeton, on
which the excitement and quality of play generated by the team event
far out-did that of the ostensibly stronger individual tournament.
Though this prior degree of passion and
commitment to the Five-Man Teams did lessen somewhat when the tourney
switched to softball approximately a decade ago, interest and
participation levels still remained reasonably high in recent years,
though the domination enjoyed for the last several editions by the top
college teams was known to have caused a decline among the non-college
team entries from various regions, which were increasingly entering
this event knowing that they had very little realistic chance of
advancing. For the past several years, the final-round match-up has
been Trinity, which is stocked with foreign-born players and has won
the last five Potter Cups emblematic of the intercollegiate team
championship, against a Princeton contingent that has won two straight
(and three of the last four) Ivy League titles.
The Tiger class of 2003 quartet,
consisting of 2002 and 2003 Intercollegiate Individual finalist Will
Evans, 2001 Individual champion David Yik, Dan Rutherford and Eric
Pearson, was deemed by many the best squash class in Princeton history
and had a host of great performances in the run of victories, often by
irreducible 5-4 margins, over their also highly talented Big Three
rivals Harvard and Yale. But probably the highlight of their decorated
college careers came in last season’s Five-Man Team final, when
they were jump-started by a rousing comeback Pearson win from 8-2 down
in the fifth (saving a total of eight match-balls) against
Trinity’s Pat Malloy, following which Yik, Evans and Yasser
El-Halaby all defeated their opponents to give Princeton a 4-1 win, the
more remarkable for occurring on Trinity’s home Kellner Courts
turf in Hartford.
SPARSE RESPONSE
Even with that immediate backdrop, and the allure of
having this year’s tournament hosted by Yale University on its
spectacular Brady Center courts, there were only a handful of entries,
far too few to justify going forward with the event, which was
cancelled earlier this week when it became clear that it was too late
for that total to rise appreciably, or at all. The irony is that the
non-college teams would have done much better this year, since neither
Princeton nor Harvard (both of which are in their reading and exam
period these next several weeks) nor Trinity (whose varsity is training
in Hawaii until later this month) were able to participate in the wake
of the date change from the early-December time slot it has been
occupying to early January, which has also cost it a number of entries
due to the simultaneity of the hugely popular William White
Invitational at the Merion Cricket Club this coming weekend.
A switch back to the December date would certainly
be helpful, as the USSRA is clearly acknowledging by the tentative
decision it has already reached to re-schedule this tournament for that
time. But the more long-range priority is to revitalize the interest
and enthusiasm levels of the various SRAs for fielding teams, both
men’s and women’s, to represent them in national
competitions like the Five-Man Teams and regional tourneys like the
Lockett Cup, a New York-Boston-Philadelphia seven-man event that
similarly declined significantly before disappearing altogether a
decade ago, and counterpart city-vs-city tournaments in New England,
the Washington-Baltimore area and around the country. These
associations are the lifeblood of the national organization, and only
by taking seriously and learning the cautionary lesson imparted by this
week’s cancellation of a tournament which had a great tradition
can the USSRA take the major steps forward that it envisions to bring
squash in this country to new levels of interest and participation