A Few Contrasting Thoughts About This Past Weekend's Results By Rob Dinerman Dateline March 3rd ----
The college and hardball singles seasons both concluded in noteworthy
fashion this past weekend, with Amanda Sobhy culminating her undefeated
four-year college career at Harvard with a fourth straight
Intercollegiate Individuals title, Ahmed Abdel Khalek staging a
stirring rally from the brink of defeat to become the first player from
Bates College ever to win the men's crown, and Mohamed Reda becoming
the second player in as many years (preceded by Julian Illingworth in
2014) to win the U. S. Hardball Nationals after never having played
hardball squash prior to the week of the tournament.
At the Individuals, held at Jadwin Gymnasium in Princeton,
in a compelling sign of the degree to which what is happening
throughout the squash world is also impacting the American
intercollegiate level, both men's finalists, Ahmed Abdel Khalek of
Bates (who trailed two games to love before eking out an 11-9 third
game en route to his five-game win) and Osama Khalifa of Columbia, are
Egyptian, as is the women's runner-up Kanzy El Defrawy of Trinity
College, who won the first game of her Sobhy final and earned a slight
lead midway through the second before the Crimson superstar (whose
father, Khaled Sobhy, is ALSO Egyptian) rallied to her four-game
victory. Sobhy thereby equaled Gail Ramsay's accomplishment (from
1977-80) as the only women to win the Individuals all four years;
Princeton's Yasser El Halaby is the only man to have won four straight
Individuals, conquering four different opponents --- Will Evans in
2003, Will Broadbent in '04, Illingworth in '05 and Sid Suchde in '06
--- during his mid-2000's run.
But El Halaby lost several dual-meet matches,
including one, in which he had a third-game match-ball, that cost his
team what would have been a huge win over Trinity in 2006, and Ramsay
attended Penn State, which didn't have a formal squash team, whereas
Sobhy went undefeated in dual meet, Howe Cup and Individuals
competition throughout her four-year career, compiling a 62-0 record
overall.* Also undefeated as collegians were Michael Desaulniers
(1977-80) and Alicia McConnell (1982-85), both of whom handily won all
three Individuals which they entered; Harvard star Desaulniers missed
the event his junior year due to a stress fracture in his right foot,
and McConnell turned pro prior to her senior year at Penn and hence
wasn't eligible to play intercollegiate squash that year.
If the Individuals weekend demonstrated the depth and
vibrancy of the college game (as does the fact that Trinity's
national-champion men's team didn't have even one first-team
all-American), the U. S. Hardball Nationals, held at the Merion Cricket
Club in suburban Philadelphia, was yet another dispiriting reminder of
how far what for decades had been a truly magnificent event has fallen,
despite the valiant and praiseworthy efforts of its aficionados to
re-energize it. With few hardball courts remaining, most players were
forced to adjust “on the fly” after a winter of playing either doubles
or softball singles or hardball on softball courts, and this
contingency, combined with dead spots on the floors and the
inconsistent performance and erratic bounces of the fuchsia hardball,
led to cheap winners all over the place and short, spasmodic points.
Other than the 16-player Open division, which offered several thousand
dollars in prize money, five of the six competitive categories, (which
had a combined total of only 30 players) had to be run as round-robins,
and three of them (the 75's, 80's and a women's division) had only
three entrants apiece. A draw for players in their 20’s had been
planned, but it was cancelled after only one person signed up for that
flight.
Ted Marmor had completed his tournament schedule and won
the 75's flight by 10:30 Saturday morning; Charlie Baker won the 80's
by playing one match Friday afternoon and another match Sunday morning
(having not played at all on Saturday); and the women's tourney, won by
1981 Yale captain Tracy Ball Greer, was almost a "secret event,"
conjured up with such little notice that there wasn't even a posted
draw, nor is it referenced on the U. S. Squash web site, and the last
of the three matches on the schedule, between the two women Greer
vanquished, hasn’t even been played yet as of this Tuesday evening
writing and will likely be contested later this week. Gary Yeager
earned the 60's championship, rising superior to that nine-man field
and justifying his No. 1 seeding; Jim Zug Sr. took a competitive though
straight-set 70’s final over Eric Berger; and Tom Harrity successfully
defended his 50's title, beating 2011 50's winner Bryce Harding in the
final after Zug, Berger, Harrity and Harding had all strode unscathed
through their respective three-person pre-final pools.
Harrity and his late-1980's WPSA hardball singles tour
colleague Alan Grant, who also spent the weekend partnering up with his
wife, Kat, in the concomitant Merion Mixed doubles tourney, both
attained the semifinals of the Open draw, there to lose to Reda and
Hamed Anvari respectively, with Reda, an assistant pro at Merion who
only started hitting a hardball singles ball early last week but whose
athleticism and energy serves him well on the PSA singles circuit, then
edging Anvari in an exciting and high-quality four-game final.
Illingworth, who moved from New York (where the 2014 Nationals was
held) to his native Portland last summer, didn't attempt to defend his
title, and Chris Walker, who won the 2013 event with a 15-13 fifth-game
final-round tally over Anvari, has been bothered by hip inflammation
that has sidelined him from competition for the past several months.
*
Thanks to Michael Bello, Executive Administrator of the College Squash
Association, for the statistical support that he provided for the
intercollegiate-squash portion of this article.
