Trinity Women Boosted by January Recruit, Return of Two Veterans by David Keating photo Trinity Athletics
January 19, 2016
- Trinity College squash again has a midseason surprise for teams
battling the Bantams as the college squash season reaches high gear
this month. This year, it’s the women’s team that will be far stronger
due to a January recruit and the return of two strong players in the
second half of the season.
The Bantam men may well be the
team to beat, having won 77 individual matches while losing just four
as the team compiled a 9-0 record and retained the #1 college ranking.
Those
who thought Stanford’s upset 5-4 win over the Trinity women in November
meant the team was out of the running for a top finish are sorely
mistaken. While clearly the Cardinal have greatly improved and
have become a real force, as confirmed by their strong 7-2 win over #8
Columbia last weekend, two Trinity players starting now, Salma El
Defrawy and Anna Kimberley, were missing in that and most early season
contests. El Defrawy was out with a concussion and Kimberley was
in Australia for fall semester abroad.
Equally important, a
strong recruit, Jenny Haley, from Caldicot, Wales is now in the lineup.
While she is currently playing #6 for the team, it’s possible she could
rise further if her team and junior results are any indication.
In her first matches, against #7 Cornell, #8 Columbia and #15 F&M,
she has allowed fewer points in her matches than her teammates
immediately above or below her on the ladder as the #6 Bantams rolled
to three consecutive victories while dropping just one individual
match. In junior competition, she was a quarterfinalist at the
2014 US Junior Open. At the 2015 British Junior Open, she played very
competitively with two 9/16 seeds.
Co-captain Sachika
Balvani praised Haley’s play on court and said it’s “always better to
have a January recruit” and that Trinity is a “very different team than
in November.”
Haley arrived January 2, when the team got
back together to begin practices after the holiday break. Haley’s
appearance on the team in January might have been in doubt, but on
December 21, she tweeted “Student visa has been approved!”
She
has played in a team environment before, noting that she represented
“Wales since age 14 or15 in the European team championships.” Her
interest in college squash was triggered when, at just age 15, she
played for Wales, with teammate Tesni Evans, in the 2011 junior women’s
squash team championship that was played at Harvard University.
Haley told me she is “really looking forward to seeing what we can do – we’re training hard and playing well.”
Kimberly,
El Defraway, and Haley add significant strength to the team, playing at
positions 4, 5, and 6. Against Stanford, Trinity’s then #5, who
along with the other lower ladder players lost to Cardinal women, now
plays #9, and so the Bantams now have a very deep team.
The
stronger team will face key tests later this month with matches
against, Yale, Penn and Harvard, three of the four top teams in the
rankings.
