Werner Brandes, 1939-2025, Phillips Exeter Academy Boys Head Squash Coach For 24 Years by Rob Dinerman
photo Seacoastonline
Dateline March 7, 2025
--- DSR is sad to report the late-January passing of Werner Brandes,
85, who taught German and History at the Phillips Exeter Academy for 40
years (from 1964-2004), during which he also served as Dean of Students
for the Exeter Summer School and as Head Coach of the Academy’s boys
squash team from 1968-92.
Brandes discovered the sport almost by accident during the winter of
1966; the team’s No. 1 player that year, Peter Wilson, was one of his
dorm advisees and Brandes, an American Studies enthusiast who had been
a basketball and team-handball player in his native Germany, would
often show up in the gallery of the old courts to watch him play.
Brandes immediately gained an appreciation for the athletic,
psychological and strategic aspects of the sport and the imagery it
conjured up for him as being “three-dimensional billiards” and
“geometry in motion.” After completing his dissertation in late January
and mailing it to Munich, Brandes made a celebratory trip to the
Academy bookstore, where almost as a lark he purchased several comic
books and, more pertinently, a sturdy Maine Line squash racquet.
That spring, Wilson practiced a fair amount on his own in preparation
for his (ultimately quite successful) college career at Yale and gave
Brandes some squash pointers, thereby launching his faculty advisor’s
career as a squash coach. Soon Brandes was competing with some of the
other faculty members and making the obligatory trip to Cambridge for a
lesson with Harvard’s legendary coach Jack Barnaby. Armed with the
invaluable information and advice he received during his hour-long
session with the Crimson icon, Brandes was ready for his move into the
Academy’s head coaching position, which occurred in the fall of 1968
when David Thomas, who had coached the team for several mid-1960’s
seasons, became the Head of College Placement and later Dean of
Students, positions which precluded him from continuing as varsity
coach.
The impact Brandes would make on the Academy varsity squash program
during the considerable span of his 24-year head coaching tenure was
profound and enduring. He was a firm believer in Barnaby’s philosophy
of “coaching deep,” and he ran an active challenge-match ladder (two
matches per week, even during the heart of the schedule) and developed
a methodical series of drills and practice routines, including a
“Princeton points” session, so named because it was used at the
Princeton summer squash camps, that would force the players to focus on
long “percentage” exchanges during decreasing-point tiebreaker sessions
(i.e. best-of nine, then best-of five, then best-of-three, then two
one-pointers), with the winner staying in the court and the loser
having to move to the right. All of these techniques were designed as
strategy sharpeners and attention getters, as well as to make his
charges (most of whom entered Exeter having never played squash before)
learn to focus and to cope with pressure.
With the help of Chuck Kinyon, a phys-ed instructor who later became
the Director of Racquet Sports at Dartmouth, Brandes also organized the
Exeter Open, an annual tournament that by its ninth and last edition in
1984 had become a fixture on the USSRA amateur circuit, with more than
100 entrants from as far away as Chicago, Washington D.C., Atlanta and
Philadelphia. In addition, he ran the Bavarian Open (faculty
championship); drove his varsity players to Boston for informal matches
against MIT and the Union Boat Club (assisted by club member Joe Bowen,
who moved to Exeter upon his retirement in the mid-1970’s and became a
loyal supporter of Exeter squash); supervised the Lockett Cup (the
annual school championship) and the Warren Williams event (for club
players); planned several early-1980’s co-ed Christmas vacation trips
to the squash-rich Philadelphia region to give PEA’s best players
additional match experience against top schools as Haverford, Episcopal
and Shipley; and revived the annual matches between the Exeter faculty
and their Andover counterparts that had been so popular during the
1940’s and 1950’s, when both schools actually entered faculty teams
which traveled into Boston every Tuesday evening to compete in leagues
run by the Massachusetts regional squash association. These events
often drew as many as 20 to 25 participants a side under Brandes’s
organizational leadership while creating a bond between the faculty
members of these now co-ed two schools that belied the rivalry that
existed when their respective varsity teams clashed at the end of a
sports season.
Brandes frequently drove to Boston to see high-profile squash events
like the Boston Open, a major stop on the World Pro Squash Association
(WPSA) tour, the Boston Eye-Opener in Allston, important Harvard Ivy
League meets and Massachusetts-hosted national junior tournaments.
During these trips, he befriended such high-profile Boston-based squash
standouts as Mohibullah Khan, one of only four players to win both the
British Open and North American Open, the most important softball and
hardball titles respectively. Mo Khan came up to play an exhibition in
1970 to dedicate the 12-court squash complex that arrived that year
with the opening of the George H. Love Gymnasium.
The advent of those courts brought Exeter back into the limelight of
east coast squash and allowed the Academy to play a prominent role in
the popularity explosion that the game was undergoing nationally and
indeed world-wide during the early 1970’s. They attracted such elite
Boston-based amateurs as Lenny Bernheimer and Tom Poor, both ranked in
the USSRA top-ten, who would occasionally dash up I-95 in a Datsun 280
Z during their lunch break to give a demo and hit with the varsity
before heading back to Boston. Both won the Exeter Open, as did Ron
Beck, Charlie Duffy and Greg Zaff, who at one time ascended to the No.
2 ranking on the WPSA pro hardball circuit. As proof of the regard that
his colleagues gained for him during his tenure, the New England
Interscholastic Team Trophy for the best seven-man team based on
regular-season competition came to be known as the Brandes Cup.
It was a coaching tip Brandes delivered to his senior captain Arif
Sarfraz ’72 that helped get the latter to the finish line of the New
England Interscholastic Championship that year. Sarfraz had managed a
hard-earned two- games to one final-round lead over Middlesex star Bill
Strong, who had prevented what would have been the first all-Exeter
final in a dozen years by edging Sarfraz’s teammate Bob Fisher in a
five-game semi. But Strong was coming on by the end of the third game
and the match was definitely still in the balance. During the
between-game break, Brandes urged Sarfraz, whose crisp forehand rail
was his most potent weapon, to consistently attack the left-handed
Strong’s relatively weaker backhand rather than steer the ball over to
Strong’s forehand, which had produced most of his winners to that point.
Sarfraz responded with a perfect application of this stratagem, which
enabled him to race out to an early lead and close out the match in
decisive 15-6 fashion, and four years later he would be one of three
Exeter captains --- Thor Kayeum and Bill Fisher were the others
--- who were in the starting lineup of the 1976 Princeton squad that
defeated reigning champ Harvard in the season-ending Intercollegiate
team tournament. During the six-year period from 1975-76 through
1980-81, the Exeter boys team was a combined 82-17, including four
sweeps of the home-and-home series with arch-rival Andover, and three
of those teams (1976-77, 1978-79 and 1980-81) were undefeated New
England Interscholastic team champions. Brandes’s last team, the
1991-92 squad, was the most international and multicultural team
Brandes ever coached, consisting of Matt Willey (Scotland), Pierre
Bastien (France), Kabir Mulchandani (Mumbay), Rajeesh Alla (Pakistan),
and Tim Filla (Ireland) along with Americans Mike Kane and Quentin
Palfrey. They overwhelmed Andover 7-0 and 6-1 to send their popular
longtime coach out on a winning note.
Brandes is survived by his wife, Ute; his sister, Gudrun; his sons Uwe
and Philip; and four grandchildren. A memorial service to celebrate his
life will be held on April 5th at 11am at Phillips Church in Exeter,
New Hampshire, with a reception to follow.
