Wendy Bartlett Goes Out On Top After 40 Years As Head Women's Squash Coach At Trinity College by Rob Dinerman Dateline March 22, 2024
--- Earlier this week Wendy Bartlett announced that, after 40
years --- and four College Squash Association (CSA) Howe Cup national
team championships (in 2002, 2003, 2014 and 2024) --- as the Head
Women’s Squash Coach at Trinity College she has decided to
retire. In addition to those four team championships, as well as
eight additional final-round advances (in 2001, 2004, 2013, 2014, 2015,
2018, 2019 and 2023), three of Coach Bartlett’s players (Amina Helal in
2002 and 2003, Nour Bahgat in 2009 and Kanzy El Defrawy in 2016) won a
total of four CSA Individual crowns, and Helal (2004), Catalina Pelaez
(2014) and El Defrawy (2016) were selected as recipients of the
most prestigious honor in CSA women’s squash, namely the Betty Richey
Award, “given annually to the senior women’s college squash player who
best exemplifies the ideals of squash in her love of and devotion to
the game, her strong sense of fairness and her excellence of play and
leadership.” Coach Bartlett herself received a singular honor when she
was inducted into the CSA Hall of Fame during a ceremony in March 2019.
She also head-coached the Trinity College women’s tennis team
throughout the 31-year period from 1984-2015, and her 40 years at the
helm of the Bantams women’s squash program make Bartlett the
longest-tenured coach of any sport in the history of Trinity College
athletics.
She had been a successful enough tennis player in high school to be
recruited by the coaching staff at Rollins College in Florida, after
which she returned to her family home base in Pittsburgh and took the
position of head tennis and paddle pro at the Fox Chapel Golf Club. It
was during that late-1970’s stage that her father, who was an avid
recreational squash player at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association,
introduced her to the sport and, in her words, “I was instantly
hooked!” She met her husband, Rich Bartlett, on the club’s squash
courts and they married in 1983 and moved from Pittsburgh after he got
a job in West Hartford. She and Becky Chase, Trinity College women’s
squash and tennis coach at the time, met at a tennis tournament
shortly after the Bartletts’ arrival in Connecticut and became friends.
At Chase’s invitation, Bartlett attended the 1984 CSA women’s
Individual squash tournament in nearby Wesleyan, and it was during that
weekend, immersed in the energetic atmosphere with all those high-level
squash matches being played on Wesleyan’s courts, that Bartlett had an
“Aha!” moment at the realization of how exciting the college squash
environment had become. When Chase was hired by Yale six months later,
Bartlett was the first person she recruited to take her place as the
coach of Trinity’s squash and tennis teams, and Bartlett, still
savoring what she had experienced at Wesleyan, eagerly embraced this
opportunity.
Although nine Trinity College players earned first-team All-American
honors during Bartlett’s first decade and a half in Hartford, the team
really hit its stride in the early 2000’s, advancing to four
consecutive Howe Cup finals (winning two of them, as noted) from
2001-04, contending throughout the remainder of that decade and
subsequently engaging in a tremendous rivalry with Harvard atop the
world of women’s college squash. These two juggernauts met in the
Howe Cup finals for three consecutive years (2013-15) as part of a
period in which they were final-round opponents six times in the 10
Howe Cup tournaments that were contested during the period from
2013-23. The Bantams won a riveting 5-4 final in 2014 as the only team
to interrupt the Crimson’s run of 10 Howe Cups in 11 seasons from
2013-23.
Bartlett’s crew also ended Harvard’s all-time record 102-match winning
streak when they invaded Harvard’s Murr Center on January 15, 2023 and
administered a 7-2 beating that delivered a ringing message, one that
reverberated throughout the college squash community and marked the
team as, at the very least, a serious contender for the 2023 national
team championship. So did its undefeated run through the rest of the
season and the two pre-final rounds of the 2023 Howe Cup. But in the
final against seven-time defending-champion Harvard, the Crimson
players were able to “flip” three of the six-weeks-earlier dual-meet
matches, two of them when the Trinity players were a combined three
points from winning matches that they ultimately lost.
Within a few days after that Howe Cup final ended, Coach Bartlett
underwent meniscus surgery on her right knee. Under normal
circumstances, the surgery would have been performed in December, but,
since the recovery period would have lasted six weeks, she decided to
wait until after the national team championships. This was a clear ---
and characteristic --- case of “taking one for the team,” since, by
delaying the surgery, she was in a lot of pain during January and
February as the tear got increasingly larger. She had previously had
spinal fusion surgery in 2018 and meniscus surgery on her left knee in
2019.
She had actually planned to retire last spring (i.e. the spring of
2023), but, after coming so close and falling barely short, and knowing
that everyone of her 2022-23 starters would be returning in 2023-24,
she was determined that she would coach one more year to get her team
over the top --- which is exactly what happened this past season,
during which the Bantams capped off an undefeated dual-meet season with
a surge through the 2024 Howe Cup that concluded with a decisive 6-2
final-round victory over a Princeton team that had eliminated Harvard
in the semis. This result showed the resolve of both Coach Bartlett and
her players --- who, rather than be demoralized by the heartbreaking
conclusion to the 2023 Howe Cup final, instead were even more motivated
than ever to take that last step --- and allowed Coach Bartlett to
write a storybook ending to her long and illustrious coaching career.
Rob Dinerman’s A History Of Squash At Trinity College was released in October 2023.
