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.