Paul Assaiante Inducted into College Squash Hall of Fame by Rob Dinerman
photo Trinity Athletics
Dateline March 31st, 2021
--- Paul Assaiante, whose Trinity College men’s teams have won 17
Potter Cups --- emblematic of the men’s college national team
championship --- and reached the final round 22 times in the 23-year
period from 1997-2019, was inducted into the College Squash Association
Hall of Fame last week. Assaiante’s teams have posted a 463-26 overall
won-lost record during his 27 years in Hartford, including one period
from November 1998 to January 2012 during which the team won 252
consecutive dual meets and 13 straight Potter Cups, both all-time
records by a wide margin. A national champion player himself in the
1994 U. S. National Doubles 40-and-over division (with Gordon Anderson
as his partner) and in the 2003 50-and-over softball singles flight, he
has also distinguished himself as an author, lecturer and the U.S.
National Coach for many years.
Assaiante’s coaching career began at Army West Point
in 1974, when he was initially hired as an assistant coach in
gymnastics, his first-love sport. After that school’s longtime head
tennis and squash coach Ron Holmberg retired two years later, Assaiante
was appointed to those positions, where he served for nine years before
becoming first the head pro at the Apawamis Club in Rye from 1985-88,
then the men’s squash coach at Williams College from 1988-90, then the
head pro at the Baltimore Country Club from 1990-93 and finally the
head pro at the Princeton Club of New York prior to starting at Trinity
College in November 1994 on the eve of the 1994-95 college squash
season.
It took only two years for Coach Assaiante to make the program
into a contender. His first major recruit was Marcus Cowie, who as a
freshman led the Bantams to the 1997 Potter Cup final (where they lost
5-4 to three-time defending champion Harvard) and won the
Intercollegiate Individual championship, known as the Pool Trophy. The
following year, Trinity defeated Harvard in the midseason dual meet,
but lost when the teams met again a few weeks later in the 1998 Potter
Cup final. But beginning in 1998-99, Trinity went wire-to-wire
undefeated for 13 consecutive seasons, more than doubling the previous
record of six straight held by Harvard from 1983-88. During that
historic winning streak, there was a host of times when it was in
serious peril, perhaps the most prominent of them being the 2009 Potter
Cup final at Princeton’s Jadwin Gymnasium, where the host Tigers,
leading 4-3, had one of their players, David Letourneau, up 2-0, 7-2
(nine-point scoring) against Parth Sharma. Even after the latter
somehow surmounted that daunting deficit en route to an eventual 9-7
fifth-game victory, in the one remaining match, Princeton’s No. 1
player, Mauricio Sanchez, who had defeated Baset Chaudhry in the dual
meet between these two schools one week earlier, earned a 5-0 lead in
the fifth game of this rematch for the college team championship.
But Chaudhry wound up winning nine straight points (albeit with a
number of hands-out) to give the Bantams their 11th straight
championship. After successful defenses each of the next two years,
Trinity finally saw the consecutive-dual-meet streak end at the hands
of Yale and the consecutive-Potter-Cups streak broken by Princeton
during the 2011-12 season. Trinity did regain this title in 2013 and
win it as well in 2015, 2017 and 2018 before losing in the finals to
Harvard in 2019 and suffering a rare semifinal loss to Penn in 2020.
Even though by then 35 years had passed since Assaiante’s time
at West Point, one statement by General MacArthur has stayed with him
and greatly influenced the way he coached (and continues to coach)
throughout that lengthy interim. The General’s declaration that,
“Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that on other
days, on other fields, will bear the fruits of victory” was engraved on
a statue of him that stood right outside the West Point gymnasium,
which meant that Assaiante read it when he passed by the statue on his
way to the squash courts every single day. Although winning
championships is certainly a significant marker of a coach’s success,
when asked to share his view of the essence of his coaching philosophy,
Assaiante’s response was/is that his status as a coach has given him
the opportunity, through the vehicle of sport, to better prepare the
student-athletes on the squash team for the challenges of living their
post-college lives. When given a chance to elaborate, Assaiante
emphasized that in the crucible of athletic competition one learns how
to win, how to lose, how to strategize, how to make adjustments on the
fly, how to maintain control of one’s emotions and to cope with and
rebound from temporary setbacks, bad luck, unexpected obstacles ---
pretty much all the contingencies that one will run into in living
one’s broader life present themselves in the microcosm of sport.
Assaiante’s other major mantra besides the lessons
embodied in MacArthur’s dictum are that, even though he initially
viewed himself as coaching an individual sport, he learned over the
years that it is really all about the team, which made him realize the
importance of impressing upon his players that they “are not in this
alone,” and that they will be more productive, effective and fulfilled
when they are focusing on the greater good rather than solely on
themselves. Trinity College’s teams have always been known for being
close-knit, for the fierce loyalty among teammates and for their
awareness that each player owes it not only to himself but to the team
members competing on the courts next to theirs to give his absolute
maximum effort in each match that he plays. Indeed, even though three
of Assaiante’s players --- namely Cowie in 1997 and 1998, Bernardo
Samper in 2002 and Chaudhry in 2008 and 2009 --- have won a combined
five Individuals titles, there have also been years in which his
players expended so much of themselves in the Potter Cup tournament
that none of them were able to win even a single main-draw round in the
subsequent Individuals tournament.
Assaiante has acknowledged that when he started out as a coach
more than four decades ago, his main ambition was to attain success and
receive acclaim, but he now feels that what matters most to him are the
times he has shared and the relationships he has formed with his legion
of current and former players, more than 125 of whom turned out to
share the moment with him when he was inducted into the U. S. Squash
Hall of Fame at a ceremony at Drexel College during the 2016 U. S.
Open. The original plan had been to have a similar “live” ceremony when
he and Dave Slosburg, the other CSA Hall of Fame inductee from the
Class of 2021, were honored last week, but, in prudent deference to the
Covid 19 pandemic that caused the cancellation of the entire 2020-21
college squash season, the ceremony had to be conducted “virtually.”
Two of Assaiante’s former players, Chris Binnie ’12 and Rick Penders
’18, both of whom later became his assistant coaches, spoke on his
behalf during the video tribute, as did two of the school’s
administrators, namely Joanne Berger-Sweeney, the President of Trinity
College, and Drew Galbraith, its Director of Athletics. The hope is
that, when life eventually gets back to normal in the U. S., there will
be a live ceremony at which time these inductees can be, albeit
belatedly, honored in person.
Although Assaiante has always claimed that, “When
you are inducted into the Hall of Fame as a player, it’s all about you,
but when you are inducted as a coach, it’s all about your players,” it
is worth noting that, through a half-dozen student generations of
Bantam squash players, the only common denominator in nearly a
quarter-century’s worth of championships has been Paul Assaiante
himself, and he seems to be fully on track to continue mentoring his
charges and giving them life lessons that they can use on and off the
court for many years to come.
