August 29,
2004-Three
outstanding mentor/coaches, one of whom also had some extraordinary
playing achievements in hardball, softball and doubles, will be
inducted this October 2nd into the USSRA Hall Of Fame. The ceremony
honoring Harvard men's coach Harry Cowles (posthumously), '76 National
singles and (with Ralph Howe) doubles champion Peter Briggs and
Dartmouth women's coach Aggie Kurtz will take place at the USSRA 100th
anniversary dinner, hosted by the University Club Of New York, at which
time the three Class of '04 Hall Of Famers-elect, namely Sharif Khan,
Demer Holleran and Ned Bigelow, will also (posthumously in Bigelow's
case) be inducted.
The fact that Barnaby himself was known by HIS players (including his
own successor and protege Dave Fish, whose 13-year coaching career from
1976-89 book-ended the Cowles era and completed Harvard's 70-year
coaching trilogy) for this exact trait is itself a tribute to the gift
he perceived, and later emulated, in his role model. Examples of the
foregoing are when Cowles famously substituted cheap silk string for
high-quality gut in the racquet of the power-hitting Beekman Pool,
whose streaking drives thereby didn't come off the back wall and
instead turned his shots into winners and himself into a national
champion; the manner in which he maximized Germain Glidden's
exceptional quickness by encouraging him to hit the kind of high-return
but high-risk shots (like the three-wall) that he would have
discouraged in others, since Cowles knew that Glidden was fleet enough
to out-run the set-ups that would occasionally result from his daring
salvos; and the subtle fashion in which he played off the egos and
aspirations of his top players against each other in a way that would
keep all of them at top competitive pitch.
BRIGGS: GREATEST LEFT-WALL DOUBLES PLAYER OF HIS GENERATION
The same torch-carrying responsibilities that a grateful Barnaby took
on throughout his own splendid career for the legendary achievements of
his coach Harry Cowles were equally enthusiastically shouldered on
Barnaby's behalf by one of HIS star products, namely Peter Briggs,
whose early-career insouciance and long-haired Harvard-days
self-presentation belied the extraordinary squash achiever and citizen
that he would become.
Whether he was rallying from 4-12 to 15-13 in the fifth game of the '75
Nationals semis against Jay Nelson, conquering a bad case of the flu
and an early deficit against a first-team all-American opponent to
contribute a crucial win in Harvard's 5-4 squeaker over Penn for the
'73 Ivy League and national college championship or winning all seven
doubles tournaments he entered (with FIVE different partners!) during
his magical 1983-84 campaign, Briggs could be counted on to come
through in flamboyant and charismatic style. His '76 singles/doubles
Nationals parlay was unequalled for 27 years until Preston Quick did so
in '03, and that year Briggs also won the Mexican Nationals, the annual
Harvard Club Of New York invitational named, fittingly enough, in honor
of Cowles, and (again with Howe) the Canadian National Doubles, while
reaching the final of the Canadian National singles and the semis of
the Boston Open (whose final round Briggs had attained two years
earlier), where he took the virtually invincible Sharif Khan all the
way to 10-all in the fifth before Khan finally escaped with the win.
His '83-'84 doubles season, arguably the best in squash history to that
point, saw him win the Cambridge Doubles and North American Doubles
with Mark Talbott (his co-recipient of the WPSA Doubles Team Of The
Year designation in a unanimous vote), the Heights Casino event with
Gul Khan, the Racquet & Tennis tourney with Larry Hilbert, the
Elite and Metropolitan Opens with Dave Johnson and the U. S. Mixed with
Joyce Davenport. He also won the Cambridge Club tournament with Ralph
Howe in '77 and '81 (and got to the final with Talbott twice in the
late 1980's), the North American Open with Jeff Stanley in '95 (after
falling just short in the final the previous year), the City Athletic
Club invitational with Howe in '77, and the William White twice in the
late 1980's with Gordy Anderson. Even as recently as this past spring,
Briggs, now 53, collaborated with Peer Pedersen (his partner as well
two years earlier in their successful drive to the 2002 U. S.
45-and-over crown) to win the Worlds 45-and-over title in Philadelphia,
the host city of his Nationals win 28 years earlier.
In addition to his career exploits on the hardball singles and doubles
fronts, Briggs also played on the '76 USA team that competed in the
World Team Championships in the international (i.e. softball) game and
coached the men's team in '89 in Singapore and '91 in Finland and the
women's team in '92 in Vancouver. During the past dozen years of his
16-year (and counting) tenure as the head pro of the Apawamis Club
(whose prestigious annual invitational he won four times during the
1970's) in Rye, NY, no fewer than 58 high-school and/or college
captaincies have been attained by the products of the highly praised
junior program he heads, and the establishment last year at Apawamis of
the Briggs Cup, a biennial event on the ISDA pro doubles tour whose
$100,000 purse is the highest in the history of squash on this
continent, compellingly reflects both its honoree's own competitive
accomplishments and the personal regard, admiration and respect that he
has richly earned over his 35 years of intense, varied and richly
rewarding involvement with the game.
KURTZ: DARTMOUTH COACHING PIONEER
It was just as Briggs was beginning his career at Apawamis that another
squash icon, Aggie Kurtz, a true pioneer in the annals of women's
college squash and later an inductee into the U. S. Lacrosse Hall Of
Fame as well, was leaving her position at Dartmouth after 17
distinguished years. In contrast to Briggs, who at both Harvard and
Apawamis entered and greatly enriched programs that already were
steeped in outstanding traditions of excellence, Kurtz became in
1972 the first woman appointed to the Dartmouth athletic staff. Charged
with establishing, coaching and building up the field hockey, squash
and lacrosse women's programs during the first year that women were
admitted as undergraduates in Hanover, Kurtz laid the groundwork for
the perennially successful programs that emerged in each of these
widely differing sports, while playing so integral a role in Dartmouth
women's athletics as a whole (including developing intramural programs
involving women) that the college wound up naming its annual award for
the undergraduate woman "who best combines proficiency in athletics
with dedication to the furthering of women's sports" in her honor.
In the competitive sphere, Kurtz (whose participation in the '77
Bancroft Open, the first-ever U. S. women's squash tournament to offer
prize money, was part of a playing career that included several top-ten
rankings) coached the Big Green to winning dual-meet records in all 17
of her years at the helm.
Highlighting her 117-67 won-lost record (a .649 winning percentage)
during that extended span were a dramatic 5-4 (from four matches to
love down) first-ever upset win over a favored Princeton squad in '87
and a best-ever second-place Dartmouth finish in the Howe Cup the
following year. The Howe Cup itself, emblematic of the women's
intercollegiate team championship, owed its very inception in '73
largely to a movement spearheaded by Kurtz, who through her initiative
and that of a few of her college coaching colleagues during that
critical formative period in the early 1970's made an important
contribution to the health and expansion that women's college squash
would undergo.
It is in recognition of her continuing efforts to build up the Howe Cup
to the exalted status it holds today that in '98 the tournament
division in which the Nos. 9-16 teams play off was named the Kurtz Cup
in honor of the woman who also received the Achievement Bowl in both
'76 and '90, the only two-time recipient of that coveted USSRA
citizenship award in its half-century history. The multi-front
contributions Kurtz made to the growth of the women's college squash
game during a crucial formative period in its existence make her fully
deserving of the spot she will take this autumn alongside her Crimson
counterparts Cowles and Briggs as USSRA Hall Of Fame inductees in the
class of 2005.