June 22, 2009
- Squashtalk
recently paid a visit to Kirk Randall, the highly respected varsity
boys’ and girls’ squash coach at the Phillips Exeter
Academy in southern New Hampshire who has just completed his 10th
season in that capacity after serving 18 years as the head pro at the
University Club of Boston, in order to get his take on the current New
England squash scene. The competitive milieu in New England prep (i.e.
boarding) school squash changed dramatically in the aftermath of the
early-1990’s switch from hardball to softball in terms of its
impact both on school facilities and the competitive aspirations at the
collegiate level of the prep-school varsity programs, and the coaches
and administrators of the New England Interscholastic Squash
Association (NEISA) have had to make adjustments to these shifting
competitive currents as well.
Beginning with NEISA’s formation in the early 1950’s and
continuing through the subsequent four decades, the top- and even
second-echelon varsity players at the New England prep schools could
expect to have prominent positions on Ivy League rosters --- it was not
at all uncommon for recent graduates from Exeter, Andover
(Exeter’s chief rival since both Academies were founded by
members of the same family, with John Phillips founding Exeter in 1782
after his brother, Samuel Phillips, had founded Andover in 1778),
Deerfield, Choate Rosemary Hall, Milton, Tabor, Westminster, Middlesex,
Belmont Hill and St. Pauls, along with their counterparts from private
day schools like Episcopal, Shipley, Chestnut Hill, Haverford and Hill
from the squash-rich Philadelphia area, to comprise the entire nine-man
lineup at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Penn, which dominated the top
tier of the college rankings during that lengthy time span.
But once the colleges turned to the international (i.e. softball) game
after the 1993-94 season, prodded in no small measure by the New
England prep-school switch a year or two earlier, which itself occurred
in the wake of the softball-oriented trend that junior squash was
clearly following at the time, the American players were inexorably
elbowed down the varsity ladder, and in many cases onto the JV,
displaced by players from foreign countries who had been playing the
softball version of the game since childhood. The last American player
to win the men’s Intercollegiate Individual tournament, John
Bernheimer, a Belmont Hill alumnus, accomplished this feat 19 years
ago, in 1990, when he was a senior at Harvard, and Trinity College,
which under coach Paul Assaiante has won the last 11 Potter Cups
emblematic of the Intercollegiate Team Championship, has not had a
significant American presence in their formidable lineup since Preston
Quick, class of 2000, a subsequent two-time winner (in ’03 and
’04) of the S. L Green national singles title and a three-time
(in ’03, ’04 and ’07) U. S. National Doubles champion
who has also earned a top-four ISDA pro-doubles ranking during each of
the past three years with John Russell as his partner.
What this transformation in the college squash scene has meant is that
New England prep-school players, even those who hold down the top few
spots on the team, who choose to attend elite squash-playing colleges
like the Ivy League schools and Trinity, do so with the understanding
that they will have major difficulty cracking the starting nine and are
extremely likely to spend their entire varsity careers fighting
(possibly in vain) to make one of the last few spots on the varsity. In
the current climate those American players who do attain positions
higher up in the lineup are far more likely to come not from the New
England prep schools but rather from private day schools in New England
or the Philadelphia metropolitan area who have access to top-tier
coaches at their parents’ private clubs (Will Broadbent, class of
’02 at the Brunswick School in Greenwich, CT, who during his
high-school years took frequent lessons with the Greenwich Field
Club’s British-born two-time S. L. Green champion Damian Walker
on weekday afternoons and who later starred at Harvard, is an example
of the foregoing), and who have the freedom to maintain an active
junior-tournament schedule both in the U. S. and abroad.
The latter option is never available to students at Exeter or many of
the other prep schools, a number of which have classes on Saturday
mornings. The members of the teams at Brunswick and its
“sister” school, Greenwich Academy, fully deserve the No. 1
standing they have held throughout the decade of the 2000’s
(though Brunswick had to share the 2007 No. 1 New England team award
with a similarly undefeated Exeter squad led by three-year No. 1 Mike
Maruca and No. 2 Ed Casserley), but their ongoing access to near-daily
individual and group lessons from prominent pros at the half-dozen
private clubs in Greenwich, Rye and Stamford have clearly played a
significant role in their success as well.
This dynamic has also discouraged some of the top squash-playing
juniors from matriculating at New England prep schools, since they know
that doing so is likely to exact a price in their U. S. junior ranking,
both because of this limitation in their tournament access and because
most prep schools require their students to play fall and spring sports
as well, rather than allowing them to concentrate on one sport. In
addition, the academic standard at Exeter and its prep-school
counterparts in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut is very
high, the course load extremely rigorous, the expectation constantly
present that its students, in addition to fulfilling their homework and
sports commitments, will also engage in extra-curricular activities and
volunteer in their communities, and the pressure to gain admission at a
reputable college noteworthy and quite tangible.
These various constraints have forced New England prep-school coaches
to be truly efficient, a task made easier by the extraordinary squash
facilities that their respective schools have constructed in recent
years. At Exeter, for example, where when the sport began in the early
1930’s one had to negotiate a frigid and pitch-black 25-yard
tunnel to reach the two rows of four chilly courts each with a catwalk
that doubled as a gallery in between, the three softball courts that
were erected as a stopgap measure in the late 1990’s have been
replaced by the magnificent Fisher Squash Center, dedicated in 2005,
which constitutes a beautifully lit and arrayed squash paradise
featuring 10 glass-back-wall courts with gallery space for 500
spectators located right in the heart of George Love Gymnasium.
Deerfield responded with a 10-glass-back-wall-court facility of its own
last season and the other NEISA members have all constructed squash
complexes of comparable dimension that reflect how far squash (which
used to rank well behind such winter-season sports as hockey and
basketball) has advanced in the prep-school totem pole, and how greatly
the number of students who play the game recreationally or at the club
(i.e. intramural) level has expanded as well.
Coach Randall, 67, who for many years was an elite middle- and
long-distance national-level competitive runner himself and coaches
Exeter’s distance track runners in the spring after the squash
season ends, is a firm believer in building a stamina and conditioning
base in the first few months of the season which he hopes will pay off
in February, the critical month when most of the key matches against
NEISA rivals, culminating in the home-and-home annual series with
Andover and the season-ending New England Interschols tournament,
occur. His teams often begin practice with an aerobic run of about 20
minutes followed by solo drilling, pairs drilling and
“condition” games to encourage the use of certain shots or
to learn strategic play. The members often play short,
high-pressure games with different opponents, sometimes handicapping
the games, so that all levels get to play with each other.
Randall tries to mix up the players on the varsity and JV during drills
and competition so that they have to deal with different styles of play
and different levels of intensity. He also either begins or ends many
team practices with squash-specific sprinting drills or strengthening
exercises. He believes that inculcating a combination of movement
efficiency and racquet fundamentals will put his charges in a position
to maximize their squash potential both during their time at Exeter and
afterwards.
Pursuant to the goal of peaking in February, he pushes his players in
training for each of the early- season matches with the belief that
they must learn to play and push themselves when tired, so if that is
what happens early on, it will be of benefit later in the season.
One of the problems that he and other coaches encounter with athletics
in general at Exeter is dealing with students who do not get enough
sleep, are constantly tired and on the verge of sickness, if not
actually sick, especially during the winter months, all of which
prevents him from accomplishing what he would like because the players
just are not capable of recovering from intense training, a frustrating
by-product of the reality of the school and the work required of the
students in the classroom.
Just as one definite plus that New England prep-school squash has
always enjoyed that continues as powerfully to this day as ever is the
pulsating rivalries that exist among the NEISA institutions (an Exeter
late-February “revenge” 4-3 win during Randall’s
inaugural 1999-2000 season over an Andover squad that had dominated the
5-2 early-season meet gave him an adrenalized indoctrination into the
Exeter-Andover rivalry, as well as an important lesson in the
unpredictability of those clashes), so too an upside to having to
compress the learning curve of a difficult sport like squash into the
brief four-year span is seeing Exeter alumni/ae in many cases
experience far more success in their collegiate careers than their
prep-school results would have suggested.
Among recently graduated Exonians, Liz Wright at Mt. Holyoke and Aaron
Ligon, captain as a senior in ’06 of a Stanford squad coached by
American icon Mark Talbott, both of whom were just off the seven-player
Exeter lineup before their dedication to improvement started paying off
as collegians, are prime examples of this phenomenon, as is Kavitha
Mannava, who just completed her sophomore year as a solid member of the
varsity squad at Williams. Randall disciples who were more predictable
in making solid contributions to their respective college teams were
the four Haynes siblings, namely Crosby at Dartmouth, Patrick and Breck
at Brown and Schuyler at Bates (the youngest member of the clan,
Player, was captain of the ’09 squad and will be entering George
Washington University this coming autumn); Tony Maruca, Mike’s
older brother, at Williams (the youngest of the three, Andy, is
captain-elect for next season); Nelson Schubart at Tufts; Duncan Ma at
MIT; three-year Exeter No. 1 Leah Stork and William Lewis at Stanford;
Sarah Odell at Wellesley; Casey Simchik at Wesleyan; Todd Ostrow at
Harvard; and Micah Wood at Middlebury.
Player Haynes’s counterparts this past season, girls’
co-captains Libby Pei and (team MVP) Sarah Beresford, are heading to
Vassar and Brown respectively still riding the momentum of the
remarkable in-season turnaround that their team conjured up during the
winter of ’09, one in which after a deflating 1-4 start they won
nine of the final 10 matches, including three consecutive 4-3 victories
in which a different heroine emerged each time, from captain-elect
Katie Quan to Carolyn Meister to Alex Manfull to Meeta Prakash to Emily
Gibadlo to Beresford herself, whose prominent membership on a
field-hockey team that went far into the New England playoffs delayed
the start of her squash season. What made this season-ending surge so
compelling is the fact that, other than the Hong Kong-based Pei, who
played No. 1 most of the season and whose three-years-older sister
Sally had also been a successful Exeter squash player, not one of the
starting seven had played squash prior to attending Exeter.
It is the ever-present potential for accomplishments like the foregoing
girls’ team surge that has inspired Exeter coaches to attain
extraordinary longevity at the helm --- Randall’s 10 years are
far exceeded by the 30 years that the late George Bennett logged from
1931-61; the 21 years compiled by Werner Brandes (in whose honor the
New England Interscholastic Team Trophy was re-named) from 1968-92
(there were three sabbatical years during that time frame); and the 23
years during which Spruill Kilgore guided the girls team from the
late-1970’s until her retirement in 2000 --- and that has fueled
the efforts of Randall’s colleagues at the other New England prep
schools as well to ensure that those schools retain a significant
presence in the overall squash picture in the United States.