Potter Cup Preview: Trinity, Ivy Champ Columbia Seeded Nos. 1 and 2, Yale Fails To Qualify by Rob Dinerman Dateline February 20th
--- A dual-meet season that had more than its fair share of 5-4 tallies
and surprising results will culminate this weekend in Hartford, where
the top-seeded reigning title-holder Trinity College will host the
Potter Cup tournament between the top-eight-ranked schools to determine
the men’s national team champion for 2017-18. The Bantams, who
went undefeated during the regular season and have captured 16 of the
past 19 editions of this event, are slated to begin their attempted
title defense Friday afternoon against a rejuvenated Princeton
contingent whose return to the Potter Cup after a four-year hiatus was
one of this winter’s feel-good stories.
So too was the strong play of the University of Pennsylvania
squad, which finished tied with Princeton and Dartmouth for third place
in the Ivy League (at 4-3) but which lost three 5-4 matches --- to
Princeton, Harvard and Columbia --- by a combined six points.
Against Princeton, Penn No. 7 Yash Barghava led Abhimanyu Shah 10-9 in
the fifth before yielding the final three points; in the Harvard match,
Penn No. 8 James Watson, trailing Bradley Smith 10-4 in the fifth game,
fended off five straight match-balls against him and drew to 9-10
before Smith was able to finally garner the clinching point; and in the
mid-February dual meet against Columbia (the last match ever to be held
at the Ringe Squash Courts, which will be demolished this spring after
a 59-year run), Penn No. 3 Marwan Mahmoud battled Columbia standout
Seif Attiah right to the end of their 11-8 fifth game. By emerging
victorious, albeit barely, the Lions, led by their senior captain and
reigning Individuals champion Osama Khalifa, clinched their first-ever
Ivy League pennant.
Penn’s frenetic season also included their being on the winning
end of 5-4 matches with Yale (in which, with the team score knotted at
4-all, Karim Tarek won the No. 4 match against Pierson Broadwater) and
Dartmouth. This latter outcome was decided when Penn's No. 1 freshman
star Andrew Douglas, a finalist in the 2017 US National Championship,
won 3-2 over Alvin Huemann, to whom Douglas had lost when they played a
few months ago in the preseason Ivy Scrimmages this past autumn. The
fact that five of Penn’s seven Ivy League matches were decided by 5-4
scores --- and that, had those six points instead landed in the Quaker
column, they would have been 7-0 and won the Ivies --- points up how
closely matched the league has become. Penn will take on No. 3 seed
Harvard in the first round, with the winner to then play whoever
triumphs between No. 2 seed Columbia and No. 7 Rochester.
A potential semifinals rematch between Columbia and Harvard would be
something special in the aftermath of their mid-January dual meet in
New York that essentially decided the Ivy League title, in which five
of the nine matches were decided by two-point margins in the last game,
including the final match on court, where, with the team score tied at
four matches apiece, Khalifa eked out an 11-9 fifth-game win over
Crimson No. 1 Saadeldin Abouaish. Harvard and its dynamic coach Mike
Way is seeking a men’s/women’s “double” in the wake of the manner in
which its women’s team dominated the Howe Cup this past weekend with a
trio of 9-0 scores over, sequentially, Cornell, Yale and Trinity.
In the draw’s top half, the Trinity-Princeton victor will
then meet whoever wins the No. 4 vs. 5 match-up between St. Lawrence
and Dartmouth. In Trinity’s 5-4 late-January road win over St.
Lawrence, the Saints, playing without two members of their top nine,
nevertheless swept the top three slots. With their full cast of
starters now restored to health, they come into the weekend as
formidable contenders.
For the first time in the 29 years since the inception of
the Potter Cup competition in 1989, Yale failed to qualify for the
tournament and instead will play in the Hoehn Cup for teams ranked Nos.
9 though 16. Coach Dave Talbott’s troops suffered through a midseason
five-match losing streak that dropped them out of the top eight, and
their season-ending 6-3 loss to Dartmouth, their school-record eighth
setback of the season, doomed their last hope of making it into the top
flight. The quality of play and degree of parity among the top teams is
at an all-time high --- as witness the fact that no school has won this
tournament twice in a row since 2011 --- and at this stage a few
unsuccessful recruiting bids and a handful of close defeats can have a
substantial impact on a team’s standing within the sport.
