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Tor Christoffersen and Justin Cook Capture 2025 UNC Hardball/Softball Crowns
by Rob Dinerman

Hardball A - Winner Tor Christoffersen, Runner up Justin Cook

Hardball B - Winner David Hermer, Runner up Tefft Smith

Hardball C - Winner Cooper Smydra, Runner up Adam Lee

Softball A - Winner Justin Cook, Runner up Saurav Jain

Softball B - Winner Hazim Muktar, Runner up Derek Fulton

Softball C - Winner Dan Adler, Runner up Charlie Schoenecker

Softball D - Winner Uli Roennau, Runner up Yash Chadha

Softball C consolation - Rick Taft v Adam Lee

Hardball C consolation - Yasmine Ackall v Haris Mukhtar

Softball D Consolation - Yasmine Ackall v Bana Haloush

Softball B consolation - Christer Berg v Warren Wang

UNC women's team

UNC men's team

Paula And Palmer Page

Dateline April 12, 2025 --- Tor Christoffersen (hardball) and Justin Cook (softball) surged to victory in the seventh annual UNC Hardball/Softball Championships during the first weekend in April at Fetzer Hall, the massive gymnasium on the University of North Carolina (UNC) campus in Chapel Hill. The eight squash courts (four regulation 18.5-foot-wide hardball and four 20-foot-wide softball) comprising the Grauer Family Squash Center were buzzing with activity throughout the weekend, as a total of 75 participants --- many of whom “doubled” by playing in both the hardball and softball flights --- vied for supremacy in seven full-16-player draws. Each division’s matches were best-of-three games prior to the semis, with the semifinal and final rounds being best-of-five, and the games in every category used softball scoring (with each game to 11 points, with a clear margin of two), even though in hardball singles the games are normally to 15 points.

Christoffersen --- currently ranked in the top 15 of the SDA pro doubles tour and prior to that a member of two Trinity College national college championship teams during the late twenty-teens --- has just completed his first season as the head coach of UNC’s men’s and women’s squash teams. His extraordinary range and athleticism, as well as the familiarity with hardball squash’s angles that he has acquired during his several successful SDA seasons, enabled him to play at an attacking pace that overwhelmed all four of his opponents in straight-game fashion in the Hardball A draw, including his 11-5, 6 and 8 tally over Cook in the final. That outcome aside, if a vote for the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player were to have been taken, the winner would have to be Cook, who reached both the Hardball and Softball A finals, winning the latter over 2024 Softball A champ Saurav Jain by scores of 11-6, 5 and 7. Cook, 39, the head squash coach (and a Math teacher) at Woodberry Forest, an all-boys prep school in Virginia, played a combined eight matches in barely more than 24 hours, and his hectic Sunday schedule began with an 11:00 Softball semi with Christopher Gsell --- the 2019 UNC captain and winner of both the Hardball A and Softball A events in 2022 --- and continued with an 11:40 Hardball semi with Jain, followed by the Hardball final at 1:00 and the Softball final at 1:45! In both his matches with Jain, a 2024 graduate of NC State who is still involved coaching and supporting its squash team, Cook’s relentless pressure, dogged persistence and consistent stroke production enabled him to successfully counter his opponent’s truly remarkable retrieving skills and knack for carving imaginative front-court winners. Making Cook’s performance all the more praiseworthy is that he had never hit a hardball prior to his first-round match early Saturday afternoon. The ability that Cook demonstrated both to adapt to a different version of squash so quickly --- indeed almost instantaneously --- and to switch between the two forms of the game virtually from one hour to the next with no loss of effectiveness, is a tribute both to his versatility and to the universality of all forms of squash.

In the remaining flights, most of which were highly competitive, Tefft Smith, now in his late 70’s and the winner of multiple hardball age-group titles over the years, rallied from a two-games-to-one deficit to survive a route-going semi over Christer Berg before losing a four-game final to UNC alum (Class of ’89) David Hermer in the Hardball B division and Cooper Smydra defeated UNC senior (and the No. 1 seed) Adam Lee 3-1 in the Hardball C final. The Softball B was won by top seed Hazim Mukhtar, who was hard pressed in a semifinal match-up with UNC grad student Isaac Tjandra that had three two-point games (including the 13-11 close-out fourth) before winning his final 3-0 over Derek Fulton. Daniel Adler culminated his no-games-lost march through the Softball C draw with a trio of 11-7 games in his final with UNC junior Charlie Schoenecker, while in the Softball D draw, Uli Roennau justified his No. 1 seeding with a four-game final-round win over UNC freshman Yash Chadha.

As has been true for a number of years, the tournament was superbly organized and run by Palmer Page, a member of the College Squash Association (CSA) Hall of Fame and winner of the Intercollegiate Individual championship in 1971, who also hosted a garden dinner party at his nearby residence on Saturday evening. One of the highlights of the weekend was the UNC teams’ season-ending Friday-night banquet at the Chapel Hill Country Club, to which all of the tournament’s participants and sponsors were invited. Coach Christoffersen’s speech featured the debut of awards for Most Valuable Player --- named in honor of Paula Page, Palmer’s wife, and herself a UNC alumna and huge supporter of the program --- and Most Improved Player, named in honor of Mukhtar, UNC Class of 2020, who himself has improved significantly both during his college years and throughout the half-decade since his graduation, as witness his triumph this past weekend in the Softball B tournament. Team captains Luke Hepler and Gala Hermer (David Hermer’s daughter) were the respective MVP recipients, while freshmen Roennau and Mariana Pelypenko were honored with the Most Improved selection.

Most importantly, both TEAMS improved greatly during the course of the season, at the end of which the UNC men’s team won their division of the CSA National Club Team Championship (with a 9-0 final-round victory over Tufts University) and the UNC women’s team placed second in their flight. Christoffersen noted in his speech that, “This is just the beginning for North Carolina Squash,” and indeed this is a program that is clearly on the ascent. Thirty-three current UNC squash players --- 19 men and 14 women --- competed in the tournament (many of them in both hardball and softball), as did several dozen UNC squash alums and team supporters from the surrounding community, along with a substantial New York contingent and others who traveled from as far away as the west coast. The tournament raised more than $50,000, which will help fund the 2025-26 season, with key support being provided by David Slosburg, Peter Grauer, UNC Class of 1968 and Bloomberg’s Chairman Emeritus, and his fellow UNC alums Hermer, John Townsend ’77, Thomas Benjamin ’83 and Edwin Poston ’89, as well as the family of the late Eric Fast ’71 and the Sharma, Marshall and Sipp families, all three of whom have children who are current UNC team members. Paul Chan, Smith and many others have consistently provided financial support for UNC Squash, and the future looks extremely bright both for this squash tournament --- whose 2026 edition will take place on the March 28th/29th weekend --- and for UNC Squash as a whole.

Rob Dinerman is a two-time U.S. Hardball Nationals finalist who has written five books and hundreds of articles about college squash. His most recent book --- A Century Of Champions: 100 Years Of College Squash, 1923-2023 --- was released in March 2024.