2023
Potter Cup Finals Summary: Match-Ball-Saving Heroics In Multiple
Matches Key Harvard Men’s Successful Title
Defense by Rob Dinerman Dateline February 27, 2023
--- In what has to go down as one of the greatest clutch performances
in the history of college squash, the Harvard men’s team overcame a
daunting early deficit to defeat Trinity College 5-4 yesterday
afternoon in the final round of the 2023 Potter Cup emblematic of the
national college men’s team championship. The Crimson comeback was all
the more praiseworthy for coming on Trinity’s home courts and against a
giant-killing sixth-seeded Trinity squad that entered the Sunday
showdown with tremendous motivation and momentum after having already
earned a pair of pre-final upset victories over the Nos. 3 and 2 seeds
respectively, Princeton and Penn, both of whom had handed Trinity
decisive setbacks (7-2 in each case) in the regular-season dual-meet
matches on consecutive days less than a month earlier.
Clearly not satisfied with this latter pair of triumphs, the Bantams
came out firing in the opening set of matches, taking a 3-1 lead that
was one unconverted double-match-point from what would have been a
virtually insurmountable 4-0 score. Khamal Cumberbatch (11-9 in the
fifth over Harvard No. 8 Liam Rotzoll) and Abdelrahman Nassar (13-11 in
the fourth over Harvard No. 2 George Crowne) registered the first two
points of the day with a pair of airtight victories, and their teammate
Ahmed Ismail was on the cusp of joining them as a first-shift winner
when he led Tate Harms 2-0, 10-8 in the No. 4 match. But, just as he
had done in the dual meet against Penn’s Omar Hafez five weeks ago by
saving a total of six third-game match balls against him en route to a
five-game victory, Harms rescued the third game 13-11 and won the
fourth and fifth 11-9 and 11-7 to get Harvard on the scoreboard and
avoid a first-shift sweep.
However, in the next completed match of the day, Trinity No. 6 Benedek
Takacs out-played David Costales to make the team score 3-1. At that
juncture, the Bantams had come within clear range of clinching the
outcome, since in the other two second-shift matches, their No. 9
player, Danial Izham had rallied from 0-2 to force a fifth game with
Ayush Menon and, in the No. 3 match, Trinity freshman Joachim Chuah and
Ido Burstein were neck-and-neck late in the fourth game, with Chuah
leading two games to one. He got to match ball at 10-9, but Burstein,
in what may have been in retrospect the key sequence of the day, won
the last three points of both that game and the fifth (in which he
trailed 9-8), following which Menon eked out his fifth game, also by an
11-9 tally. It marked the second consecutive year of Potter Cup heroics
for Burstein, who had been the last-match-on-court winner over Nathan
Tze Bing Kueh in Harvard’s 5-4 2022 Potter Cup final-round win over a
Penn team that, like Trinity this past weekend, was playing on its home
courts.
Suddenly and stunningly, what had been a 3-1 advantage for a Trinity
team that was just a few points from 5-1, over and out, had totally
evaporated, resulting in a 3-all score and a transformed competitive
landscape in which the Crimson camp knew that all it needed was a split
of the Nos. 5 and 7 matches in order to get the championship onto the
racquet of its No. 1 player Marwan Tarek, the 2020 Intercollegiate
Individuals champion. Denis Gilevskiy promptly created exactly that
scenario by delivering an efficient 11-8, 7 and 5 win over Trinity No.
5 Marawan ElBorolossy (the only three-game match of the day), following
which Tarek, after losing the second game of his match with Mohamed
Sharaf, dominated the last several points of the third game and raced
out to 6-0 in the fourth, which he closed out 11-5 on a tinned Sharaf
forehand volley that provided Harvard its clinching fifth point.
Harvard’s comeback win, combined with the Crimson women’s team triumph
one week earlier in a 5-4 Howe Cup final-round win over a Trinity team
that had convincingly (7-2) won the Trinity-Harvard dual meet, gave the
Harvard program and its incredibly successful head coach Mike Way a
fourth consecutive Potter/Howe Cup “double,” tying the record
established by the Harvard men’s and women’s squash teams from 1994-97
under head coach Bill Doyle. No other college coach has guided both a
school’s men’s and women’s team to the national team championship in
the same season even once. Both of Harvard’s 2023 national titles were
earned in finals that were rivetingly hard-fought and close. Four of
the nine matches in the Potter Cup final went to a fifth game, the
scores of three of those fifth games were 11-9, one other match
(Nassar’s 13-11 fourth-game win over Crowne) ended with a two-point
close-out game as well, and, perhaps most significantly of all, in two
of Harvard’s wins, its player had to save at least one match ball
against him. Similarly, Harvard’s women’s team members had to “flip”
three of the matches they had lost in the dual meet and all three of
those matches went five games, with one of those fifth games having to
be resolved in a 12-10 tiebreaker and another coming after the
Harvard player (Brecon Welch) had fallen behind, two games to one. Both
the Potter Cup and Howe Cup final-round summits came down to the No. 1
match, in which both Tarek and his women’s-team counterpart Marina
Stefanoni (over Jana Safy) came through.
There were milestones everywhere one looked, as befits the fact that
the 2022-23 season marked both the 100-year anniversary of the
first-ever college squash match (in which Harvard’s men’s team
prevailed 4-1 over Yale at the Racquet & Tennis Club in midtown
Manhattan in February 1923) and 35 years since the 1988 postseason
tournament, the last time that it was held as a six-man, three-flight
event before being modified into its current full nine-man team
tournament beginning in 1989. Harvard’s 2023 Potter Cup win was its
fifth under Coach Way to go along with the 10 Howe Cup crowns his
women’s teams have annexed (hence 15 national team championships
overall). Last, this past season constituted the 10th straight year in
which the Harvard coaching staff --- consisting of Head Coach Way,
Associate Head Coach Hameed Ahmed, Assistant Coach/Recruiting
Coordinator Luke Hammond and Assistant Coach/Fitness Beth Zeitlin ---
has remained intact, providing a level of stability and continuity
whose importance in perpetuating the program’s success is often
overlooked but exceedingly substantial.
Rob Dinerman has covered college squash extensively for more than two decades and he is the author of A History Of Harvard Squash, 1922-2010 and A History Of Harvard Squash During The Mike Way Coaching Era (2010-21).
