12-10-24 Brunswick/title>

Brunswick School’s 2020 U.S. HS Championship Team Members Are Now Playing Starring Roles In College As Well
by Rob Dinerman

Front Row: Patrick Keller And David Beeson
Back Row: Asst Coach Ryan Abraham, Coulter Mackesy, Pierce Henderson, Nick Spizzirri, Brian Leonard, Dana Santry, Mac Aube, Tad Carney And Head Coach Jim Stephens

Coach Jim Stephens Holding The Justi Cup Permanent Trophy

December 10, 2024 --- Division I of the 2020 U.S. National High School Team Championships (known as the Justi Cup in deference to Melinda Justi, the tournament’s founder), was highlighted by the dominance of the Brunswick School entry, which swept through the 16-team draw with a quartet of 7-0 wins (over, sequentially, Potomac, 2014 Champions Avon Old Farms, Kent and Episcopal Academy) that gave the Bruins --- led by their legendary head coach Jim Stephens, who retired that spring after 35 years at the helm --- their third consecutive U.S. High School championship and fifth in six years (the sole exception being a loss in the 2017 finals to Haverford School). It marked the first time in the history of this tournament (which debuted in 2004) that a team had gone through the entire event without dropping a single match --- and, for that matter, the first time that a team had shut out its opponent in the final round --- and it was part of a 2019-20 season during which the Greenwich, CT boys school went wire-to-wire (including regular-season dual meets, the High School Nationals and the season-ending New England Interscholastic Championships) with nothing but 7-0 scores.

What is perhaps even more remarkable than the performance of Coach Stephens’s troops that weekend and that season has been the degree to which so many of them have subsequently played starring roles as collegians. Nick Spizzirri, who played No. 1 for Brunswick in both 2018-19 and in his senior 2019-20 season, has been at or near the top of the Penn lineup ever since, and he played No. 1 on the 2023-24 Penn team that won the College Squash Association (CSA) National Team Championship, known as the Potter Cup (in honor of the Naval Academy’s longtime coach Art Potter), following which Spizzirri advanced to the semifinal round of the College Individual tournament and thereby earned first-team All-American honors for the second consecutive year. Penn’s run to the Potter Cup constituted the first time that the Quakers had won the CSA’s postseason crown in the 50 years since they had last done so at the end of the 1973-74 season, and one of Penn’s seven wins in its final-round victory over Trinity College --- which reversed the outcome when these two teams had clashed in the semis of the 2023 Potter Cup --- was contributed by Spizzirri’s Brunswick School classmate/teammate Dana Santry, who had played in the No. 2 position behind Spizzirri in the Bruins’ 2020 lineup.

Coach Stephens had designated the Nos. 3 and 5 players on that Brunswick squad, Brian Leonard Jr. and Pierce Henderson, both of whom were also seniors, as quad-captains along with Spizzirri and Santry. Unlike Spizzirri and Santry --- both of whom took gap years in 2020-21 (when the Covid pandemic caused that entire squash season to be canceled) and hence will be part of Penn’s attempted Potter Cup defense this coming winter --- Leonard, who went undefeated (49-0) in dual-meet, Justi Cup and New England Interscholastic play throughout his four-year high-school career, graduated on schedule this past spring. During his senior year he played in the middle of a Yale starting nine that came within a single match of reaching the 2024 Potter Cup finals, and he had a terrific weekend-long double-achievement in last month’s Silver Racquet Invitational --- winning the Singles event and barely (15-12 in the fifth) coming up short with his partner Elroy Leong in the Doubles final against James Stout and Morris Clothier.

Among their starting-seven teammates during Brunswick School’s historic accomplishment in the 2020 U.S. High School Nationals, Mac Aube is currently playing No. 1 for Dartmouth and defeated the University of Virginia's Karim Elbarbary, a 2023-24 first-team All-American, this past weekend; Henderson, after playing in the top five at Williams College during his freshman 2021-22 season, was sidelined for much of the next two years by a knee injury severe enough to require surgery, but he had made a full recovery by the outset of the current 2024-25 season, and he scored the Ephs’ only point this past Saturday in a dual meet against Princeton; Patrick Keller is a member of the University of Virginia roster that defeated Harvard for the first-ever time this past weekend; and Coulter Mackesy, the only member of that Brunswick School septet who did not go on to play college squash, instead has become one of the best lacrosse players in Princeton history, having scored a school-record 55 goals during the 2023 season as a sophomore and then been named a Tewaaraton Award Final-25 nominee in 2024 as one of the 25 best college lacrosse players in the United States.

Tad Carney, who was only a 10th-grader in 2019-20, is currently the No. 1 player (and a second-team 2023-24 All-American) on a Yale team that will strongly contend for the 2025 Potter Cup championship, and David Beeson, although forced to deal with several injuries early in his college career, played on a 2023-24 Princeton team that co-won the Ivy League pennant and is in the Tiger starting nine this season as well. Indeed, all four Brunswick 2019-20 squash alums --- Carney, Aube, Henderson and Beeson --- who represented their colleges in varsity competition went undefeated during the weekend of December 6-8, the first really active weekend of the current season.

Although Brunswick School, whose total of five National High School Championships is tops all-time, hasn’t won this tournament since that 2019-20 season, the Bruins reached the finals in 2022 --- during which weekend the Scholastic Squash Exhibit on the ground floor of the host Arlen Specter National Training Center in downtown Philadelphia was named in honor of Coach Stephens --- and 2024, and they are expected to be among the contending teams (along with Kent School, the 2022 and 2023 titlists, the perennially-strong Philadelphia teams and the reigning champion St. Andrews School in Florida) when the 2025 edition is contested on February’s final weekend.

Rob Dinerman has written extensively about high school and college squash and is the author of A History Of Squash At Brunswick School, which was released in October 2020.