A Retrospective On The 2013 Potter Cup National Collegiate Team Championship
by Rob Dinerman
Dateline February 28th --- By early this past Sunday afternoon, after only one round of play had been completed, the top-seeded Trinity College squash team was in trouble, deep trouble, and everyone thronging the galleries at Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium knew it. Their long-time “We win at No. 9” path-to-victory mantra (in which a win at that position had for years been something that the Bantams could COUNT on) had already crumbled, their yearlong dream of regaining the Potter Cup trophy that had been memorably wrested from their grasp a year ago was already imperiled, while their final-round opponent’s vocal and plentiful Crimson-clad supporters were already gleefully celebrating their impending first Potter Cup title in 15 long years.
Ivy League co-champion Harvard, winless in Big Three competition each of the previous five years but now a monster again and led by the reigning Intercollegiate Individual champion Ali Farag, had won two of the first round’s three matches, both of which Trinity had expected to win (having won at those Nos. 3 and 9 positions in their 5-4 dual-meet win at Harvard a few weeks earlier), one of which had slipped away in excruciating (12-10 in the fifth) fashion when Miled Zarazua had been unable to convert the 10-8 lead he had held over Harvard’s Nigel Koh at No. 3. With Farag waiting in the wings and representing a certain additional point (which indeed he would convincingly secure over a game but over-matched Reinhold Hergeth) for Harvard, Trinity College Paul Assaiante knew that his team was effectively behind 3-1. Indeed, the hole his team was in would have been even deeper were it not for the hard-fought four-game win that his senior captain Johan Detter had provided at No. 6 over Tom Mullaney, who had led Detter 10-7 in the fifth in the dual-meet before an eleventh-hour Detter rally to 12-10. Even with that outcome, as the second shift of players, the Nos. 2, 5 and 8 players, took the courts, Trinity’s margin for error had been cut to virtually zero by the need to win at least four of the five matches (not counting the No. 1 match) that remained.
Instead of taking four of those five matches, the Bantams won all five, with three of its members rebounding from dual-meet setbacks to Harvard, in two cases avenging head-to-head losses they had sustained just 12 days earlier. Probably the key reversal, and likely the defining tipping point of the entire meet, was that engineered by Trinity freshman Juan Vargas, who has taken his lumps this season at No. 2, including regular-season losses to both Princeton’s Samuel Kang and his Harvard counterpart Brendan McLaughlin. The latter won the first game of this rematch handily and led late in the second before Vargas, whose older brother Andres is a Trinity assistant coach and whose father had traveled from Colombia to attend the Potter Cup, rescued that crucial game 12-10 and surged through the final two games.
Vargas’s heroics were effectively replicated by his teammate Karan Malik, who at No. 4 weathered the disappointment of an 11-9 third-game loss to Gary Power (Malik’s 3-1 conqueror in mid-February) that put him behind, two games to one, by pounding out 11-8 victories in the fourth and fifth games. Trinity also received points from Vrishab Kotian, who repeated his earlier straight-set win over Tyler Olsen at No. 5, and from No. 8 Moustafa Hamada, who had lost to Harvard co-captain Jason Michas earlier this month. Michas had injured himself a week shortly before the Potter Cup in Harvard’s dual-meet win over Yale, and Hamada dominated (with the combined loss of only nine points) his match with Matt Roberts, who had moved up from his normal No. 9 slot to replace Michas.
It was Trinity freshman Zeyad El Shorafy who provided the championship-clinching fifth point at No. 7 against Crimson senior co-captain Zeke Scherl, the hero of Harvard’s win over Yale less than 10 days ago. After losing the first two games but charging through the third, Scherl played his much-younger opponent dead-even to 6-all in the fourth and seemed possibly poised for a comeback win. It was here, with the goal line finally in sight, that El Shorafy produced his best squash of the tournament, closing out the match in glorious fashion by sweeping the last five points and sinking to his knees, overcome with emotion at what he and his teammates had achieved by redeeming the searing disappointment of last year’s 5-4 Potter Cup final-round defeat at Jadwin Gymnasium.
Coach Assaiante, who both turned 60 and mourned the passing of his mother within a few days of each other this past summer, and for whom the 2013-14 season will be his milestone 20th at the Trinity College helm, this 2013 national-championship team was special in a way that singularized it from its 13 predecessors, not only due to the historical backdrop (in the wake of the 5-4 losses to Yale in the regular season and to Princeton in the postseason in 2012) but also because this was much more a little-engine-that-could team than the kind of intimidating superstar-studded juggernaut that Bantam lineups have constituted in the past.
There have been years when two or three of the five best players in the collegiate ranks were from Trinity, as well as five or six of the 10 best. In 2008, Detter’s older brother Gustav, Trinity’s No. 2 at the time, opposed his teammate Baset Chaudhry in the Individuals final, and five years earlier, in 2003, an all-Trinity final was avoided by a mere three points, when 2003 Individuals champ Bernardo Samper had a match-ball in his semifinal against Will Evans and Michael Ferreira was two points from beating Yasser El Halaby in the other semi.
By contrast, this past season Trinity, which was swept in the top three positions in their 6-3 regular-season win over Princeton and, as noted, had dropped the Nos. 1 and 2 slots at Harvard, became the first Trinity team, indeed the first college team period, to ever win the Potter Cup without a single player ranked in the top eight and with only one player (Hergeth, ranked 10th) in the top 15 in the tourney’s several decades of existence. Assaiante, keenly aware that collegiate squash history is littered with teams that have great runs end and then fade away into oblivion, was determined that HIS team, so far from succumbing to that trend, would instead “stand the test of time and show that we could be resilient.” His teams have now made it to the Potter Cup final for 17 consecutive years, with losses to Harvard in 1997 and 1998 preceding the 13 straight wins prior to last year’s narrow defeat, which ultimately galvanized this year’s sparkling redemption.
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