A Retrospective Look At The 2025 College National Team Championships by Rob Dinerman
photos Chris McClintick
Dateline March 12, 2025–
Trailing 10-8 in the first game of what had become the deciding match
of the 2025 Howe Cup final, Trinity College junior Kara Lincou won four
straight points --- most memorably a backhand cross-court volley that
she spiked into the front-right nick to force the game into a
tiebreaker --- and carried that momentum onward to a 12-10, 11-7, 11-8
victory over Harvard freshman Ocean Ma that gave the Bantams an
unbelievably hard-earned win and with it a successful (albeit barely)
defense of the championship they had won in 2024. It marked the second
straight time that Lincou had scored Trinity’s clinching fifth point,
preceded by the 14-12 fifth-game win over Princeton No. 5 Katherine
Glaser in Trinity’s 6-2 final-round triumph over the Tigers a year ago.
That 2024 final marked the first year since 2008 (16 years earlier)
that Harvard (which had lost in the semis to Princeton) had been
stopped short of the Howe Cup final, and in six of their 14 consecutive
finals Trinity had been their final-round opponent. This year’s
resumption of this rivalry, like several of its predecessors, went back
and forth all the way to its last-match-on-court conclusion, featuring
three five-gamers --- in two of which the winner surmounted a two games
to one deficit --- and one match that ended 11-9 in the fourth. Both
teams had advanced to the Sunday summit with decisive semifinal wins
(Trinity 9-0 over Penn and Harvard 8-1 over Princeton) and In the
three-match opening tier Harvard took a 2-0 lead when Brecon Welch ---
exactly 30 years after her mother Libby Eynon Welch had culminated her
college career by leading the Crimson to the 1995 Howe Cup crown and
winning the Individual championship as well --- defeated Trinity No. 8
Fabiola Cabello 3-1 and Welch’s teammate Lucie Stefanoni won 3-2 over
Noa Romero at the No. 3 slot. A Crimson sweep of the opening tier
almost certainly would have doomed Trinity’s chances, and Harvard No. 4
Habiba Eldefrawy seemed on the verge of accomplishing exactly that when
she took a two-games-to-one lead over Hannah Chukwu.
But Chukwu won both the fourth and fifth games handily and her freshman
teammate Varia Esina evened the team score at two matches apiece with a
four-game win at No. 9 against Emma Carney. Harvard No. 2 Caroline
Fouts then won in four games over Jana Safy, but Trinity took a 4-3
lead when Janna Ashmawy straight-gamed Harvard No. 7 Amira Singh (the
only 3-0 match of the day, other than the Lincou-Ma finale) and,
crucially, Lujan Palacios rallied past Crimson No. 6 Molly Stoltz.
After this latter twosome had split the opening pair of games (Palacios
11-9, then Stoltz 13-11), Stoltz had dominated the 11-2 third game and
appeared to be in full control. But Palacios --- who had to have known
how important it was to deny Harvard its fourth team point, with
Harvard No. 1 Saran Nghiem, the 2024 Individuals champion, waiting in
the wings --- toughed out the last two games, 11-6 and 11-8 to give the
Bantams their first lead of the day.
Nghiem, who had contributed a crucial point in Harvard’s 5-4 Howe Cup
final-round victory over Trinity two years earlier, came through
against Malak Ashraf Kamal, although Kamal, after dropping the opening
pair of games, won the third 11-4 and rallied from 0-6 to 9-10 before
Nghiem nailed a cross-court winner. But by the time that match (which
made the team score 4-4) ended, Lincou had already rescued the first
game of her match with Ma, and she led all the way through the two
games that followed. In some ways this 2025 Howe Cup final was a mirror
image of the 2023 final between these two teams, during which Trinity
--- which had thrashed Harvard 7-2 a few weeks earlier in the dual meet
--- led for much of the way, only to ultimately lose when Harvard
players won multiple five-game matches (including Singh’s
match-ball-saving victory over Ashmawy, the same opponent who reversed
that result this time, also at No. 7) en route to a 5-4 victory. No
fewer than seven of this past weekend’s Trinity starting nine ---
Kamal, Safy, Chukwi, Palacios, Ashmawy, Lincou and Cabello --- were
starters on that 2023 team that had fallen agonizingly short, and these
past two years have fully redeemed that disappointment, and then some.
Trinity’s triumph this past weekend meant that the Bantams’ first-year
head coach Lauren Patrizio, who had played on Penn’s 2000 Howe Cup
championship team --- and contributed a crucial point at No. 5 to the
Quakers’ 5-4 final-round victory over Harvard that year --- became only
the third person ever to both play on and head-coach a Howe Cup
championship team, and the first to do so in her first head-coaching
season. Previously Marion Freeman, who had played on Princeton’s 1973
Howe Cup champions (the first official edition of the college Howe
Cup), coached Yale’s 1977 team, and Demer Holleran had played on
Princeton’s 1989 championship team and then coached Penn (with
Patrizio as one of her players) to its only Howe Cup crown in 2000.
Patrizio also became the first coach to guide her team to a Howe Cup
in her first season at the helm in the 32 years since Bill Doyle
accomplished the feat in his rookie head-coaching season at Harvard in
1992-93.The weekend’s outcome also represented the 19th time that Paul
Assaiante --- who has served as the assistant coach of the Trinity
College women’s team in each of the last two years after retiring as
head coach of the Trinity College men’s team (which won 17 Potter Cups
during his 29 years at the helm, including a record-shattering 13 in a
row from 1999-2011) --- was directly associated in an official coaching
capacity with a college national team championship.
In contrast to a Howe Cup final that had multiple lead changes en route
to a riveting culmination, the 2025 men’s national team championship
Potter Cup tournament, like the dual-meet season that had preceded it,
was dominated by a successfully defending-champion Penn team that
steamrolled into the final with a 9-0 semis win over Trinity College
and repulsed a powerful Yale team 5-2 in the final (the remaining two
matches were suspended when the Quakers notched their clinching fifth
point). Penn swept the first tier of matches --- with No. 3 Omar Hafez,
No. 4 Marwan Abdelsalam and No. 8 Abdelrahman Dweek losing only one
game between them in their wins over Lachlan Sutton, Maxwell Orr and
Nikhil Ismail respectively --- following which Nick Spizzirri began the
second wave with a 3-0 victory at No. 4 over Arav Bhagwati to give Penn
a prohibitive 4-0 lead. It is to the credit of the Yale players that,
even coming on the heels of a brutal semifinal win over Penn and in the
face of this daunting deficit, they nevertheless earned a pair of
incredibly hard-fought victories (Rishi Srivastava 12-10 in the fourth
over Penn No. 5 Dana Santry and Merritt Wurts 11-9 in the fifth over
Penn No. 9 Varus Chitturi) to narrow the team score to 4-2.
A Yale sweep of the third wave would have brought the Potter Cup to New
Haven, and all three of the remaining matches were extremely
competitive through the first three games. This was especially true of
the No. 1 match, in which Penn sophomore Salman Khalil --- who one
month earlier had won the Individuals with a final-round win over his
teammate Hafez in the first all-Penn men’s Individuals final in the 46
years since Ned Edwards had defeated Jon Foster in 1979 --- after an
11-4 opening game, had lost the second 13-11 to Yale’s Tad Carney. The
third went right to the end as well, but Khalil managed to edge Carney
11-9 to take a two-games to one lead, following which he asserted
himself in the 11-3 close-out fourth and sank to his knees in exhausted
celebration.
Afterwards Penn’s veteran head men’s coach Gilly Lane identified
Dweek’s win that gave Penn a sweep of the first tier, and hence a
commanding 3-0 lead --- the exact scenario that a few hours earlier
Chukwu had prevented the Harvard women from establishing with her
comeback win over Eldefrawy --- as the most important of the day. Dweek
had lost to Ismail two years earlier in the 2023 Potter Cup third-place
playoff (before beating him in the 2025 Penn-Yale dual meet) and he had
missed the entire first half of the season while recovering from a
right-hip soft-tissue tear before hitting his stride during the last
few weeks of the season. For Dweek and his fellow seniors Spizzirri,
Santry, Nathan Kueh, Roger Baddour, Ollie Green and Shaam Gambhir ---
who had lost in both the 2022 Potter Cup final and a 2023 Potter Cup
semi, in each case to teams (Harvard and Trinity respectively) whom
they had hammered 7-2 in those seasons’ dual meets --- winning the 2024
and 2025 Potter Cups represented an extremely vindicatory moment. This
past season, during which the Quakers went 20-0, compiling in the
process a 164-14 individual-matches record, constituted the first
wire-to-wire undefeated record in the history of the program, and the
first time that Penn had won back-to-back national team crowns.
The fact that there were four different schools in the Potter/Howe Cup
finals --- for the first time in the nine years since 2016, when the
Yale men beat the University of Rochester and the Harvard women
triumphed over Penn (in each case by 5-4 last-match-on-court scores)
--- is a compelling sign of how many excellent programs there currently
are in college squash. Both the successfully defending champions Penn
(men) and Trinity College (women) will be losing substantial portions
of their starting nine to graduation this spring. But both will be
formidable contenders again next season, as will a host of other
schools in what figures to be an extremely competitive 2025-26 campaign.
Rob Dinerman has written five books about college squash, the most recent of which, A Century Of Champions: 100 Years Of College Squash, 1923-2023, was released in March 2024.