Presented For The First Time: A History Of Yale Women's Squash During The Mark Talbott Coaching Era (1998-2004) by Rob Dinerman
Rachita Vora, Ruth Kelley,Abby Epstein, Lindsay Schroll, Gina
Wilkinson, Devon Dalzell, Lauren Doline, Mark Talbott, Abbie Mcdonough,
Michelle Quibell, Frances Ho, Amy Gross photo: Lauren Doline
April 17, 2017
Mark Talbott has just completed his 13th year as the head coach of the
men's and women's teams at Stanford, where he led the Cardinal women to
a fifth-place finish at the Howe Cup this past winter. Prior to moving
to California, he coached the Yale women's team for six years. This
article chronicles Talbott's tenure at Yale and the run the team made
to the 2004 Howe Cup in Talbott's final year in New Haven.
INTRODUCTION
One of the game’s most iconic figures and unique
personalities, and without question the greatest all-around player in
the history of American squash, Mark Talbott took over the Yale women’s
program at a time when its Big Three rivals Harvard and Princeton had
been dominating the league for more than a decade and led the Elis in
2003-04 to their first undefeated national-championship season in 18
years. In so doing he became one of only two people (Demer Holleran is
the other) to both have had a lengthy run at No. 1 as a player and led
a college team to the national title as a coach. There are reasons why
this playing/coaching “double” has occurred so rarely, foremost of
which is that becoming a champion athlete in virtually any sport – none
more so than squash --- requires levels of intensity and egocentrism
that does not mesh well with coaching, where it is important to leave
one’s ego out of the interaction with the player in order to allow the
player to work out his/her destiny free from the pressure of having to
live up to the coach’s expectations or accomplishments.
In Talbott’s case, the list of accomplishments even
before he arrived in New Haven was both multi-front and enormously
long. Born in April 1960 in Dayton, Ohio, the fifth of six children, he
grew up in a house that had a tennis court on the property and a
hardball squash court in the basement. One had to go through a room in
the house’s lower level called The Cabin that had stuffed animals and
muskets hanging from the walls, then climb down a ladder with a pulley
to enter the court and push the ladder back up so that it wouldn’t
interfere with the play. Lacking the presence of a coach or
squash-playing role model to emulate when he started hitting the ball
alone in that court as an eight year old, Talbott didn’t have anyone’s
playing style to copy, so he just learned the game on his own, mostly
predicated on getting a lot of balls back. When the family moved to
Baltimore when he was 13, Talbott was joined by his brother Dave, eight
years older, who had been the No. 1 player at Deerfield Academy in the
late-1960’s and a finalist in the New England Interscholastic
tournament in 1969. Their frequent practice sessions, along with the
twice-weekly (on Tuesdays and Thursdays) trips they would make to
Annapolis to practice with the Navy team (Dave would play with varsity
members while Mark would usually practice with the plebes), improved
Mark’s game enough to garner him four US Junior titles, two in the
Under-17 followed by two in the Under-19, during the five-year period
from 1975-79. In the final round of the last of his title runs in the
Under-19’s at Jadwin Gymnasium in Princeton, in an early sign of a
characteristic that would surface again and again during Talbott’s pro
career, he rallied from a two-love deficit to overtake Bryce Harding in
five games.
After graduating from Mercersburg Academy, a prep school
in Pennsylvania, in June 1978 and briefly attending Trinity College
that autumn, Talbott spent the next year and a half in, sequentially,
Detroit with Dave (who at the time was the head pro at the Detroit
Athletic Club) and his wife Anne and daughter Shannon, then South
Africa, England and Scotland. He then moved permanently back to North
America, alighting in Toronto during the summer of 1980, just in time
for the start of the 1980-81 World Professional Squash Association
(WPSA) hardball season. Trailing fellow debuting WPSA tour rookie Rob
Dinerman 12-7 in the fifth game of a first-round match in the
season-opening tournament in Rochester, Talbott conjured up an 8-1
match-ending run to rescue that game 15-13, then re-entered the court
just 90 minutes later and out-played WPSA top-10 Larry Hilbert before
losing to No. 1 seed Sharif Khan in the quarter-finals. Throughout that
season, Talbott learned his way around the tour, his progress greatly
abetted by the multiple practice games he arranged almost every day
with the several top players who were based at clubs in Toronto at the
time. Clive Caldwell (Cambridge Club), Gordy Anderson (Squash Academy)
and Sharif Khan’s younger brother Aziz (Toronto Cricket Club), all
ranked in the WPSA top 10, were frequent practice partners for Talbott,
who often would drive from one club to another in a small pick-up
truck. In the back portion of the truck, he and his brother Dave, who
had worked for awhile as a carpenter, built a small room resembling a
doghouse in appearance that was largely constructed from the maple wood
boards that had been left behind when the Detroit Athletic Club
replaced some of its squash courts a few years earlier.
The room had a cot, a small stove and a heater, and
during his first four years on the tour Talbott was able to drive it
from one WPSA site to another, since many of the venues (among them
Philadelphia, Rochester, Kitchener, Cleveland, Boston, New York,
Greenwich, Rye, Toledo, Atlantic City, Montreal, Detroit and Toronto)
were located in the continent’s northeastern corridor. Talbott
consistently made the quarters or semis that autumn and winter prior to
a breakthrough late-March performance at the Capitol Hill Club in
Washington DC where he rocked the squash world by defeating four of the
top-five ranked players (Caldwell, Stu Goldstein, Michael Desaulniers
and Sharif Khan) to win the tournament, thereby moving him from the
mid-teens of the WPSA standings to No. 9 and earning him WPSA Rookie Of
The Year honors at season’s-end.
Talbott built on this springtime 1981 burst with a solid
second season in which he advanced to the top five, then made a quantum
leap the following 1982-83 season, during which he vaulted to No. 1
(where he remained all the way through the 1991-92 season, save for a
brief occupancy of that spot by Jahangir Khan in 1984), reaching all 17
WPSA tour finals and winning 15 of them. During his extended skein of
excellence, Talbott won well over 100 singles tournaments (more than
four times as many as his nearest pursuer) and became the only player
ever to win all four of the WPSA Major Awards: Rookie Of The Year in
’81, Doubles Team Of The Year with Peter Briggs in ’84, Player Of The
Year in ’83 and from 1986-92, and Man Of The Year in ’85. He was also
selected for the prestigious President’s Cup by the US Squash Racquets
Association (USSRA) in ’89, and earned pro hardball squash’s Grand Slam
in 1988-89, when he swept to victory in all four of that season’s major
tournaments, namely the Boston Open (which Talbott won three times),
the Canadian Open (three times), the North American Open (five times)
and the WPSA Championship (five times), the only player to win each of
these events in a single season. His ’89 WPSA Championship triumph
completed not only that Grand Slam but also a family “double,” coming
as it did in the wake of the WPSA Legends event (for players age 35 and
over) that his brother Dave, who in 1983 had moved his family from
Detroit to New Haven to become the head coach of the Yale men’s squash
team, had captured earlier in the day.
More importantly, Mark Talbott’s impact on the WPSA tour
far exceeded these record-shattering on-court achievements. His gentle
demeanor and personable manner, so rare in an individual sport where
the physical and mental demands are as high as they are in squash,
endeared him to the squash-playing public and even to his professional
colleagues, and his sportsmanship level was so high that it actually
shamed the rest of the WPSA tour players into following his example.
Known in his first few years on the circuit as an exceptional retriever
who, however, was said to lack the firepower to rise to the top,
Talbott steadily increased the cumulative offensive pressure he put on
opponents, not with any thunderbolts in his racquet but rather by
keeping his drives consistently crisp and low and tight on the wall, by
increasing his volleying prowess, by making very few loose, sloppy
shots and even fewer errors, by sharpening up his front-court game
(especially the double-boast he had developed by the mid-1980’s), by
upping his conditioning level to the highest on the tour, and by
“tightening the screws” at the end of a close game to the point where
winning a rally against him at that juncture became an excruciating
assignment. His success quotient in five-game matches and in games that
went to a tiebreaker was over 90%, and there were a number of
eleventh-hour final-round comebacks that consolidated Talbott’s
reputation for never being out of a match, no matter the score. In
January 1985, Talbott was down quadruple-match-ball to Ned Edwards
before rallying to 18-17 in the fifth game of the Greenwich Open, then
went from 7-12 to 15-13 in the fifth against Edwards at the next event
in Rye, and in the ’87 Canadian Open he surmounted an 8-1 fifth-game
deficit and won 18-14 against Todd Binns.
In addition to his unprecedented hardball
singles exploits, he won the North American Open Doubles a total of
four times (including three-straight from 1997-99 with Canadian star
Gary Waite) and captured the S. L. Green US National Softball
championship in ’90, ’91 and ’93. He was named captain the first US
team that competed in the quadrennial Pan Am Games in ’95 while playing
on a half-dozen US teams in the biennial World Team Championships,
almost always at No. 1, including as late as the ’97 event, by which
time he was 37 years old. He was also the recipient of the Sharif Khan
Sportsmanship Award in ’91. Never before, or since, has this plentiful
a combination of awards for stellar play and good citizenship been
bestowed upon one person, and it is therefore no surprise that Talbott
was literally a first-ballot USSRA Hall of Famer, having been inducted
along with 14 others in the first year of the Hall’s founding in 2000.
By the early 1990’s, the WPSA had been absorbed by the
softball squash organizing body, the Professional Squash Association,
and hardball pro and even amateur squash, which had seemed to be on
such an exhilarating ascent throughout most of the 1980’s, was with
alarming swiftness fading into oblivion. A hardball tour that at its
apogee less than a decade earlier featured more than 25 events per
season all over North America, a half-dozen of which were played on a
portable three-glass-wall court in hotel ballrooms, movie theaters and
other public spaces, was down to four small-purse tournaments in its
last full season in 1994-95, by which time Talbott had finally been
displaced at the No. 1 slot by the much-younger Waite.
TRANSITION
As the hardball tour was starting to decline in the
early-1990’s, Talbott began to switch his main focus from playing to
coaching junior players in the international (i.e. softball) game. In
the summer of 1992, he opened the Talbott Squash Academy by inviting
the eight top-ranked junior boys and eight top-ranked girls to a
two-week camp at the Newport Squash Club, which for many years had been
a stop on the WPSA tour under the ownership of Sam Jernigan, whose
oldest son Kenton had been a top-five WPSA player (one of Talbott’s
foremost challengers during the WPSA tour’s final few years) and the
winner of the 1991 WPSA Championship. The campers slept in the
dormitories of the nearby University of Rhode Island. The Academy was
so successful in its first few years that Talbott was appointed by the
USSRA to serve as its National Director Of Junior Development in 1993
and then made head coach of the National Men’s Junior team one year
later.
In 1996, the Talbott Squash Academy dramatically expanded,
due in large part to a meeting that Talbott had with the administrators
at the St. George’s School, a prep school in Newport, who had already
been planning to build squash courts on their campus. Mark’s
involvement and his prominence in the squash community helped St.
George’s raise the necessary $1.25 million to build a complex
consisting of eight international courts, and that summer there were
165 attending juniors over a six-week period. There was a further
expansion the following summer to 240 attendees, overseen by a staff
that had expanded as well by then to include two head coaches, five
assistants, two-off-court trainers and his father, Dr. Doug “Doccy”
Talbott, who had established a substance abuse clinic in suburban
Atlanta when the family moved there during the early 1980’s.
When long-time Yale women’s squash coach Dale Phillippi Walker
retired after the 1997-98 season, the 18th in a tenure that had
included three Howe Cup titles (1983, 1986 and 1992) emblematic of the
women’s national team championship, Talbott, allured by the prospect of
joining his brother at the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and of taking on the
challenge of restoring glory to the Yale women’s squash program,
applied for and very shortly thereafter was offered the position by
Athletics Director Thomas Beckett. At the time that he arrived on
campus with his wife, Michelle Djokic, a noted concert cellist whom
Talbott married in 1989, and children Maya, age seven, and Nicholas,
age five, in tow, Princeton, led by its veteran coach Gail Ramsay (a
four-time Intercollegiate Individuals winner herself) was the reigning
two-time Howe Cup champion, having wrestled away that trophy after its
five-year captivity under Bill Doyle’s Harvard troops from 1993-97.
The University of Pennsylvania, coached by six-time U. S.
National champion Demer Holleran, was a rising power (which would win
the Howe Cup in 2000 for the only time in the school’s history) and all
three of these teams white-washed Yale 9-0 during Talbott’s 1988-89
rookie coaching season (with Harvard not dropping a single game in any
of the nine matches), as did Trinity College. Yale’s top four players
that year, all returnees from the 1997-98 team that had gone 3-3 in the
Ivy League, were senior captain Carla Shen, the team’s MVP in ’98,
junior Loren Smith, who as a high-school senior at Rye Country Day had
won the ’96 New England Interscholastic title, senior Marion Ringel,
like her classmate and roommate Shen an alumna of the vaunted Heights
Casino Club junior program in Brooklyn Heights, and sophomore
Catherine “Cat” Fiederowicz, who had posted a team-best 9-3 record the
previous season in the aftermath of winning the New England
Interscholastics as a sophomore at Deerfield Academy in ’95.
This quartet played valiantly all season, as did the
underclassmen in the lower positions in the starting nine (namely
freshmen Colleen Terry and former Taft captain Kate Sands at Nos. 5 and
8 along with sophomores Jen Field, Thea Handelman and Betsy Cleveland
at Nos. 6, 7 and 9), but they were overwhelmed by the vastly superior
talent of the top-tier teams and wound up finishing seventh in the
season-ending Howe Cup tournament. It should be noted, however, that
even as his powerful squad was demolishing Yale and thereby
clinching the 1999 Ivy League crown, Coach Doyle, who was completing
his seventh and final season at the Crimson helm, later commented how
impressed he was with how much calmer and more focused the Yale
players’ self-presentation had been compared with prior years, and how
much more bonded together they seemed as well, and he knew even then
that Talbott was going to make Yale into a legitimate contender before
too many more years had passed.
The team had arrived in Cambridge the evening before that
match and had been treated to a sumptuous dinner at the Blue Ginger
Restaurant in Wellesley, which was owned by Talbott’s brother-in-law,
the renowned chef Ming Tsai, a former Yale all-Ivy squash player, Class
of ’86, who had been coached at Yale by Dave Talbott and had later
married his and Mark’s younger sister Polly. The following afternoon at
the Murr Center, Smith was accidentally but forcefully jolted in the
mouth in her No. 2 match against Crimson captain Brooke Herlihy and the
Yale coaching staff discovered that she had lost a front tooth from
Herlihy’s inadvertent blow, causing Smith to default the match. The
tooth was found near the tee and Smith was rushed to a dentist back in
New Haven, since she was scheduled to have an interview for a summer
job that Monday and was hoping that the tooth could be restored in time
for the interview. In the end, this attempt failed and Smith had to go
in for the interview with a quite visible gap where the tooth had been,
but she DID receive the job offer she had been seeking and was also
elected captain for the 1999-2000 campaign, during which Talbott’s
first recruit, Gina Wilkinson, a Michigan native who had played for
three prep-school years at Hotchkiss and had been nationally ranked in
the top 15 in the Juniors, swiftly progressed into the top three of the
lineup behind Smith and Fiederowicz.
The team got two significant boosts that season, one of
them expected, long in the works and permanent, the other “out of the
blue,” spontaneous and disappointingly transitory. The first was a
significant expansion of Yale’s array of international courts and the
second was the midseason arrival of a star player the likes of which
Yale squash hadn’t had in nearly a decade. At the time that the college
squash association had voted to switch from hardball to softball during
the first half of the 1990’s, Yale had no international courts, and
indeed the Skillman Associates (the Friends Of Yale Squash, the squash
program’s alumni/ae fundraising body) had barely finished paying out
the substantial costs associated with the American-court expansion of
the late-1980’s, when everyone involved had understandably but
incorrectly believed that hardball would be the college game forever.
In response to the change, the Shen Wing was dedicated in 1996, named
in recognition of a substantial gift from Theodore P. Shen ’66, Carla’s
father, whose financial contribution led to the creation of six
international courts, one of which was a three-glass-wall arena.
That number grew dramatically when Nicholas F. Brady,
captain of Yale’s intercollegiate championship 1951-52 team and later
the Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Ronald Reagan and the
senior George Bush, spearheaded the addition of nine international
courts, one of them with three glass walls and one of them with FOUR
glass walls, which was officially dedicated prior to the start of the
1999-2000 season. As a result of this pair of major expansions, which
combined cost seven million dollars, the completed Brady Squash Center,
consisting of 15 top-of-the-line international courts, including one
four-glass-wall court (the Brady Court), two three-glass-wall courts
(the Shen and Lenfest Courts, the latter in honor of Chase Lenfest ’86)
and 12 glass-back-wall courts, is widely regarded as the premier squash
facility in America and has hosted far more national championships than
any other venue in the country.
Team morale rose even further after the Christmas holiday
break when second-semester sophomore Laura Keating, the 1998 Australian
National Junior champion and a quarterfinalist in the ’97 World Junior
Championships, transferred from the University of New South Wales and
strode directly to the top slot in the Yale lineup, where she
immediately made an impact by scoring a four-game win in her Yale debut
over Trinity’s top player Janine Thompson. Keating then almost led Yale
to what would have been a breakthrough victory in early February at
Jadwin against Princeton, the two-time defending Howe Cup champion and
a 9-0 winner over Yale one year earlier. The No. 1 Tiger player, Julia
Beaver, the 1999 Intercollegiate Individual champion, had to miss that
meet due to a leg injury, and Keating, after splitting her opening pair
of games with Meredeth Quick (later a three-time U. S. Nationals
finalist and three-time U. S. National Doubles champion), won both the
third and fourth games 9-0. Yale also got wins at the Nos. 6, 8 and 9
slots from junior Jen Field and sophomores Sands and Caroline Thompson
respectively, leaving the outcome to the No. 7 match between Handelman
and her Princeton opponent Jen Shingleton, who was able to avert the
upset by eking out the third game 9-7 and the close-out fourth 10-9.
Bolstered by what had become a powerful top three thanks
to Keating’s presence – with Smith and Fiederowicz correspondingly
moving one spot down and hence having more favorable match-ups with
their respective opponents --- Yale swept those top three spots against
Harvard, with Keating’s straight-game win over all-American Margaret
Elias marking the first time that Yale had taken the No. 1 match in
the dual meet with Harvard since Berkeley Belknap had defeated
Jordanna Fraiberg nine years earlier in 1991 en route to becoming the
first Yalie to win the Individuals at the end of that year. Harvard
wound up winning 6-3, but Yale had commanding leads in two of the
remaining matches (the freshman Wilkinson had a third-game match-ball
against Ella Witcher at No. 4 before losing that game 10-9 and the
fifth 9-7, and at No. 7 Handelman was up two games to one before
faltering in the final two games) and therefore would have actually won
the meet had both of its players been able to convert those mid-match
advantages. The team did finish fifth in the Howe Cup, partly on the
strength of a 6-3 win over a Dartmouth team that had beaten Yale 5-4
earlier in the season before Keating had arrived on the scene. Her
strong play throughout the second half of the schedule and undefeated
performance during the Howe Cup tournament caused Keating to enter the
season-ending Individuals at Williams College as one of the
pre-tournament favorites, but she fell just short in five games in the
final against the successfully defending 1999 champion Beaver.
Keating and captain Smith were named co-winners of the Most
Valuable Player Award at the team banquet that spring. Smith had first
run into Talbott more than a dozen years earlier when, as an
eight-year-old, she attended a clinic for beginners at the Apawamis
Club in Rye that Talbott, who was in the midst of his prime years atop
the WPSA tour, ran at the invitation of Apawamis head pro Peter
Briggs, Talbott’s doubles partner at the time. A framed photo of
Talbott posing with Smith that day hung in Smith’s room at home
throughout the years that followed ---until her graduation day in May
2000, that is, when Smith gave the photo as a gift to her extremely
grateful coach, as a means of conveying how much he had meant to her
during her final two years at Yale. Smith also worked with Sam
Chauncey, a former Secretary of the University and a long-time
supporter of Yale squash, to donate an aluminum Bulldog to the Brady
Center. In her capacity as team captain, she had driven to the airport
in January to pick Keating up at the airport after her 18-hour flight
to welcome her into the program.
Everyone else had done what they could to make Keating
feel welcome as well, and she had been a model teammate, humble and
supportive (though a bit quiet) and seemed to be enjoying herself,
which is why both her decision during the summer of 2000 to remain in
Australia rather than return to Yale in the fall, and the way she
conveyed it, constituted such a letdown. When Talbott --- who had
lobbied hard for Keating’s admission, had spent more time on court with
her during their half-season together than he had with any other player
and had personally driven her to Williamstown for the Individuals
tournament --- had gotten wind that Keating might not be returning and
reached her by phone, she had been curt and defensive in their
exchange, following which she sent him a terse email confirming her
decision. She did subsequently write the team a sweet, sincere and
supportive letter in which she thanked the players for their time
together and wished them well going forward. In her and Smith’s
absence, the Eli 2000-01 squad featured a top four consisting of
captain Fiederowicz at No. 1, Wilkinson at No. 3, and two freshmen,
namely Devon Dalzell at No. 2 and Abbie McDonough at No. 4, who that
season and during the years that followed would have a profound effect
on the program. Dalzell had actually been BORN in Yale-New Haven
Hospital (her father, Fred, a Princeton quarterback during the
early-1970’s, had been doing his residency at Yale at the time of her
birth), and both she and McDonough had earned top-ten rankings while
playing the national junior circuit during their high-school years.
Behind this quartet were Sands, Field, Handelman, Terry, Liese Fritze,
Sarah Levine, Anna Nordberg and Miriam Fishman, all of them seniors
other than juniors Sands, Terry and Fishman.
In early February, Dalzell earned a five-game victory at
No. 2 over Dartmouth’s Lindsey Bishop, the only Yale win in the top
four, in spite of which the Elis prevailed 5-4, with Field also winning
in five, 9-7 in the fifth, over Crosby Haynes at No. 6 and her fellow
seniors Handelman and Fritze coming through, as did Sands. This result
made it that much more painful when Dartmouth reversed that score when
the teams met again a few weeks later at the Howe Cup. This time
Dalzell again out-lasted Bishop 3-2, Fiederowicz avenged her earlier
loss to Big Green No. 1 Sarah West and Terry and Fritze both won at
Nos. 8 and 9, but Dartmouth swept the Nos. 3-7 matches, in two cases
winning 9-7 fifth games, thereby denying Yale a chance to duplicate
their 2000 fifth-place finish and relegating Talbott’s players to a
seventh-place play-off with Brown, which they won 5-4 when Fiederowicz
out-lasted Avery Broadbent, 9-6 in the fifth game.
TRANSFORMATION
To that juncture, three years into Talbott’s coaching
tenure at Yale, the program had shown progress in fits and starts but
had not yet advanced in a steady or consistent fashion. Part of the
reason was that only a trickle of recruits had heretofore committed to
Yale, namely Wilkinson in 1999 and Dalzell and McDonough in 2000.
Perhaps it was inevitable that it would take several years for the top
junior girls to become convinced that Yale was a good place for them to
go and that there was a firm commitment there to build a strong
program. Whatever the back story, the trickle was destined to become a
flood, beginning with the 2001-02 freshmen class (SIX strong recruits)
and extending throughout the remainder of Talbott’s time at Yale and
beyond. Frances Ho, though born in Texas, had spent most of her
pre-Yale life in Hong Kong, which she represented at the World Junior
Girls Team Championships in Malaysia during the summer of 2001, and she
played virtually the entire 2001-02 season at No. 1, earning first-team
all-American honors and a top-10 Intercollegiate ranking. Lauren
Doline, who like McDonough had benefited from the coaching of Geoff
Mitchell in his junior program at the Chatham Club in northern New
Jersey, and Heights Casino product Sarah Coleman joined Ho, Dalzell and
Wilkinson in the top five, while the other three freshman recruits,
Philadelphians Lindsay Schroll and Ruth Kelley (the captain of the
Episcopal Academy team that won the Philadelphia prep-school league
throughout her four high school years) along with Abby Epstein (another
Heights Casino product) and the returning letter-winners McDonough and
Sands filled the remaining spots in Yale’s much-improved lineup. With a
half-dozen seniors having graduated in May 2001 and a half-dozen
freshmen replacing them the following fall, it was like the whole team
had been re-made in one fell swoop.
A further factor in this transformation was the role
played by Miriam Fishman, the team captain, a walk-on three years
earlier whose sole squash exposure prior to Yale had been the practice
games she had played on the hardball-sized courts at the University
Club of Washington DC. She remembered that when she approached Talbott
about trying out for the team during the fall of 1998, “It was his
first year as coach, it was my first year as a player, neither of us
really knew what we were getting ourselves into and we decided to give
it a shot.” Fishman gradually grew as a player and, more importantly,
as a leader, and she came into her senior year determined to create
more of a cohesive and committed team environment than had existed the
previous year, when there had been some dissension among the 2001
seniors. No one was really at fault for the latter situation, it was
more that there were some strong personalities among this group and by
that juncture a number of them had become understandably frustrated at
being stuck in the second echelon of the college standings throughout
their college careers. A decade-and-a-half removed from the travails of
that winter, most of those 2001 seniors recalled their years playing
squash at Yale with fondness and appreciation.
Realizing that all the new faces provided the opportunity for a
fresh start, Fishman made a point of arriving on campus early so that
she could personally greet each of the freshmen as they were moving
into their Old Campus dormitories, as several of their parents
gratefully recalled. She also organized preseason team runs and
arranged for team members to have dinner together at Commons after
practice. She knew that her plan would only work if the freshmen bought
into to what she was advocating (“Otherwise it could have been a
disaster” she later noted), but her efforts at “re-working the road
map”, combined with the considerable infusion of talent, resulted in a
major step forward for the Elis, who compiled an 8-2 record highlighted
by the first wins in 10 years over Princeton, a 7-2 thrashing at Jadwin
followed by an 8-1 tally in the third-place match at the Howe Cup. The
Tigers’ loss of Beaver and Quick, combined with the large strides that
Yale had made, accounted for the turnaround, as did Yale’s
sweep through all three five-game matches in the dual meet (with
Dalzell, Schroll and Kelley all prevailing at the Nos. 2, 7 and 9
slots), which Fishman attributed at least in part to the “team energy”
that had been created by the enhanced team spirit.
There was even a team mantra that season, “Everybody Needs
A Hero,” referring to Talbott, which was emblazoned on the back of tee
shirts that were handed out to the team members, featuring a Bulldog
leaning on a squash racquet. At season’s end, Fishman received the John
Blum Squash Award “presented to that member of the team who, through
character, dedication and sportsmanship, has made the greatest
contribution to Yale Women’s Squash,” and Ho became the second freshman
in as many years (following Dalzell in 2001) to earn Most Valuable
Player honors. Beginning with her first home match that season and
extending throughout her varsity career, Ho’s efforts at the Payne
Whitney Gymnasium were supported by a substantial cheering section of
her friends who thronged the gallery and had specific cheers for her,
one of their favorites being “F-R-A-N-C-E-S --- you can’t beat her,
she’s the best. Frances Hooo! Frances Hooo!” Their vocal presence
noticeably enhanced the energy level at her matches and had an impact
on her teammates and on the opposing team as well, to the point where
once when Yale was playing an away match, one of the players from the
host school jokingly asked Ho where her cheering section was!
The following 2002-03 season brought two of the long-time
crown jewels of USSRA junior squash to Yale in Michelle Quibell and Amy
Gross, each a multiple winner of US Junior titles (Quibell had also
annexed some Scottish and British Junior crowns) and teammates on the
U. S. Junior squads in both 1999 and 2001, as well as Rachita Vora, a
national junior team member for India, where her coach growing up was
Rehmat Khan, who had been Jahangir Khan’s coach when the latter had his
run of 10 straight British Open titles from 1982-91. All three promptly
moved into the top tier of Yale’s ladder, with Quibell remaining at No.
1 throughout her sparkling four-year career, followed by Gross at No.
2, Ho at No. 3 and Vora at No. 4.
Based on her excellent record (a team-leading 11-2, mostly
at the Nos. 3 and 4 positions) during her freshmen year, Doline had
been expected to vie with Wilkinson (the team’s only senior, and its
captain), Coleman and Dalzell for the slots right behind Vora, and she
trained especially hard that summer in anticipation of a standout
season for both herself and the team. But in October she suffered a
burst appendix, which was not properly diagnosed for 10 days, by which
time her condition had become serious enough to require emergency
surgery and a full month’s hospitalization. During that time her
parents traveled from their New Jersey home to New Haven and got
permission from the Master at Trumbull College to stay in a guest room
there. Mrs. Doline actually slept on a cot in Lauren’s hospital room
for the first two weeks and her husband, a retired pediatric dentist,
was allowed to audit all of Lauren’s classes and to take notes, which
he then would bring back to Lauren so that she wouldn’t fall too far
behind in her studies. She still had drainage tubes exiting from her
abdominal area for several weeks even after being finally discharged
and allowed to tentatively return to practice, and the team welcomed
her back in a unique way by taking a team picture on the stadium court
in which everyone in attendance, including Talbott, was dressed in blue
hospital scrubs! Doline never fully regained her conditioning level or
the momentum she had been generating, but she did play in every match
other than the preseason Ivy Scrimmages, and to some degree the
already-solid team bond grew even stronger as the players rallied
around their still-recovering teammate, taking inspiration from her
resiliency and her laser focus on team success.
Yale went 8-1 coming into the mid-February Howe Cup, with
six 9-0 scores, including against Princeton, and the only setback
coming in Hartford by a 7-2 margin at the hands of a loaded reigning
Howe Cup champion Trinity College juggernaut. Quibell, in an early sign
of the greatness that awaited her, eked out a fifth-set tiebreaker
against 2002 Individuals champ Amina Helal, Wilkinson straight-gamed
Clare Austin at No. 6, and both Doline and McDonough pushed their
opponents to five games in their matches at Nos. 8 and 9. In the
semifinal of the Howe Cup, before a full house at the Payne Whitney
Gymnasium, Yale not only beat Harvard for the first time since a 5-4
Howe Cup final-round win 11 years earlier in 1992 but routed its Big
Three rival 8-1. Anything seemed possible coming into the Sunday summit
with Trinity, but the powerful Bantams were at their peak that day,
while the Elis, exhilarated but exhausted both physically and
mentally by their exploits the previous evening, were unable to
duplicate their semifinal performance and absorbed a 9-0 shut-out.
“DEAD SILENCE”
That year, and for the final time, the dual meet with Harvard
occurred after the Howe Cup tournament, which meant that just four days
after defeating the Crimson in New Haven, the Bulldogs had to travel to
Cambridge to play Harvard again, this time with the 2003 Ivy League
title hanging in the balance, since neither team had lost to an Ivy
League opponent that winter. The Harvard players, livid and galvanized
by the stinging defeat they had so recently sustained, embarked on a
furious albeit time-compressed effort to exact revenge. Normally
the team had Monday off after a full weekend of matches, but in this
case everyone showed up for practice early Monday afternoon ready to
go, with co-captain and No. 1 player Louisa Hall, who had lost to
Quibell in their Howe Cup match, especially revved up. The Yale
players, by contrast, had spent themselves by then and had to make do
without the crowd energy that had spurred them on at the Brady Courts.
There was a combination of over-confidence (several players brought
cases of beer onto the bus in anticipation of a celebratory ride home)
and concern, especially since everyone realized that the Howe Cup match
was actually much more closely contested than the 8-1 score would
indicate. Gross had taken a fifth-set tiebreaker against Harvard No. 2
Lindsey Wilkins (the two had had an intense rivalry dating back to
their high-school years in Philadelphia) and there were a few other
matches that night that could have gone either way as well.
In recalling their misadventurous evening in Cambridge many
years later, several Yale players noted that, even before the match
began, “everything was different” from the way it had been when the two
teams had met the prior weekend. The courts were different, not only
geographically but also in how they played --- the Yale courts were
active and lively, rewarding the deep game and long, attritional
points, while the Murr Center courts were better suited to shot-making,
and at Harvard a drive that caught a side wall would come much further
out into the middle, making the stroker more vulnerable to having a
let-point called against her. The crowd allegiance, of course, was also
different, and so, as noted, were the teams’ respective mind-sets in
the wake of the Howe Cup result. This became even more the case when
Harvard got off to an early lead by swiftly winning a few of the
“evens” matches that had landed in Yale’s column a few days earlier,
thereby increasing the pressure on the odd-numbered Yale players and
making them realize that they had no margin for error and that they HAD
to win their matches for Yale to gain possession of the Ivy League
crown, which it had last won 17 years earlier in 1986. It should be
remembered that the Yale team, though highly talented, was also still
very young, with three freshmen and one sophomore filling the top four
slots, and the magnitude of the moment bore heavily down on them as the
meet progressed to its riveting culmination.
With all that said, Yale still had a chance to win all the
way till the end in a competition in which the lines between these two
teams were starkly drawn, with the Lady Bulldogs sweeping the Nos. 3-6
spots without losing a single game. But Harvard sophomore
Stephanie Hendricks repeated her Howe Cup win over Ruth Kelley at No.
9, and Wilkins roared out of the gate and never looked back in
recording her first-ever victory over Gross. Both the Nos. 7 and 8
matches “flipped”, with Harvard’s Alison Fast reversing her recent loss
to Dalzell (who afterwards said she felt like she “had lead in her
sneakers that night”) and Crimson co-captain Ella Witcher doing the
same against Doline. With the score thus knotted at four matches
apiece, the Ivy League championship would be decided by the No. 1 match
between the two superstars Quibell and Hall, with both sets of parents
present (the Quibells flew in from Atlanta, as they did for big matches
during the rest of Michelle’s college career, and Matt Hall, who had
played on several Harvard Ivy League championship squash teams during
the mid-1960’s, and his wife Anne drove up from suburban Philadelphia).
The energy level in that climactic match was extraordinary, both on
court and coursing through the gallery, as both players competed at
their absolute limit, all the while demonstrating superb sportsmanship
in a memorable exhibition of women’s college squash at its best.
Even in failing to convert a game-ball opportunity in the
first game, which she then lost 10-8, Hall was stroking the ball with
tremendous authority, and she surged through a 9-0 second game and then
from 3-6 to 9-6 in the third. The fourth was close all the way and
marked by a number of extended mid-game sequences with no change in the
score. Quibell earned an 8-6 advantage but Hall rallied to force the
game into a tiebreaker. At 9-8, Hall was unable to convert her first
match-ball, but she got the serve back and made good on the second with
a forehand working-boast from deep in the right part of the court that
a diving Quibell failed to retrieve and tossed her racquet skyward in
exasperation. The men’s dual meet that night similarly came down to the
No. 1 match, with Yale freshman Julian Illingworth winning in four
close games over Will Broadbent to give the Yale men’s team its first
dual-meet road win over Harvard in the 42 years since the 1961 Elis had
done so, also by a 5-4 tally.
By midnight, the Harvard women players, jubilant at their
victory, and the 10th Ivy League crown in 12 years that it secured,
were marking this milestone by joyously “streaking” around a section of
Harvard Yard in what would prove to be the last moment of unconstrained
celebration for their program for some time to come. The Yalies, by
contrast, were sitting, as several of them put it, “in dead silence” as
they endured a funereal three-hour bus ride back to New Haven. They
felt particularly protective of the freshman Quibell, who was extremely
upset and blaming herself for the outcome, even though in truth she had
played beautifully against one of the best players in the history of
Harvard women’s squash and been right on the brink of forcing a fifth
game. Most of the underclassmen, sensing that the Yale program was on
the ascent and had great accomplishments on the horizon, felt
especially bad for their captain Gina Wilkinson, the only senior in the
top 12, who had gone 22-3 over the past two years in the midsection of
the lineup, including winning her match that night, and had contributed
to the program on so many fronts that in everyone’s mind she deserved
to go out as an Ivy League champion.
Yet as disappointing and chastening as that trip home was,
the players who returned the following season, virtually to a person,
insist that the whole experience of that night constituted a painful
but necessary step FORWARD and that the glorious three-peat
championship years that followed actually began during the somber bus
ride late that evening of February 19, 2003. All the players remembered
how they felt that night, and everyone present resolved that they would
never have that feeling again. The very next morning about a half-dozen
team members met in front of Payne Whitney Gym for a run through New
Haven’s ice-covered sidewalks to Talbott’s house a little over a mile
away in the hopes of seeing him, though it turned out that he was away
at the time. The run wasn’t really meant as a first conditioning step
towards the following season, but rather sprang out of a spontaneous
wish to be with their coach, as well as to put what had happened at
Murr behind them.
The team that re-assembled the following autumn, with
everyone, as noted, returning other than Wilkinson, was further
fortified with Talbott’s third straight outstanding class of incoming
freshmen, consisting in this case of New Zealand Junior champion and
National Team player Catherine (Kat) McLeod, the first squash player
from that country to attend Yale, U. S. National Junior Team players
Lauren McCrery (from Wilmington) and Kate Rapisarda (Heights Casino),
South African star Nicky Sheils and Exeter’s No. 1 player Katie Mandel.
McLeod, who as a teenager would play every afternoon at the Northshore
Squash Club in Auckland, where former British Open champion Leilani
Joyce and World Open champ Carol Owens frequently trained, had planned
to go to Auckland University and play professional squash. But during a
summer tournament in 2002 she happened to be sitting at the same
breakfast table as Yale No. 1 Josh Schwartz ‘05, who was playing some
events overseas to ready himself for the upcoming season, and during
their conversation (as well as in a follow-up visit to the McLeod
family for dinner), Schwartz convinced her to consider applying to Yale.
The 2003 World Junior Championships in Cairo ended just as
registration at Yale began, so McLeod planned to fly directly from
Egypt to Tel Aviv to JFK Airport in New York. But there was a
substantial delay at Tel Aviv, causing her to miss her connecting
flight and to be stuck there for several additional days, with no means
of informing either her parents or Talbott (who had promised to pick
her up at JFK and was understandably extremely concerned when he
arrived and she wasn’t there) of what had occurred. She eventually made
it to New Haven, but her luggage was lost for nearly two weeks,
throughout which McLeod therefore was forced to wear her New Zealand
track suit, which drew some awkward stares when she showed up for
class. Several of McLeod’s fellow freshmen, a number of whom she had
already met during the Cairo event or at previous junior tournaments,
swooped to her aid, and to some degree the bonding process in that
class began in this manner. All of them were grateful as well to Devon
Dalzell, the team captain, who contacted each of them in the first few
days of classes to give them her cell phone number and let them know
that she was available to assist any of them who was having trouble
finding their way to class or with any part of the transition to Yale.
Throughout the season the leadership that the two seniors Dalzell and
McDonough demonstrated was cited as a key part of the tremendous team
dynamic that animated the determined march to the championship.
The 2003-04 season began on a somewhat hilarious note when
on October 15th, the first official day of practice, the players and
Talbott congregated in a court known as “Siberia,” since it was a
stand-alone court located at the very end of a long hallway. The
players all loved it when they could get Talbott to do a dance step
known as “the shuffle” (one player said when he shuffled it looked a
little bit like he was having a seizure!) and on this occasion the
whole team was shuffling along with him. Suddenly Dave Talbott and AD
Beckett rounded the corner, deep in conversation about some
administrative matter. Dave immediately noticed what was going on in
the Siberia court and abruptly yanked Beckett back around the corner so
that he wouldn’t see it as the players collapsed in hysterics.
When play began in earnest, the team shot out of the gate.
Gareth Webber, an England Squash Level IV Elite Coach and a former
Director of the Wales and England National Squads, had joined the Yale
program that year as an assistant coach, and his technical stroking
expertise was a perfect complement to Talbott’s coaching style, which
was geared around playing practice games with his players and
stretching their games and conditioning levels. In interviews with the
latter group, one player after another marveled at Talbott’s ability to
gear his game to be one level above whoever he was on court with,
putting the ball JUST within their reach if they tried their hardest to
run it down and thereby putting them in a position to explore and
expand the limits of their own games. McLeod described the experience
as being “incredibly frustrating but also incredible fun,” and Talbott
summarized this coaching technique by saying that, “I would always put
the ball where they could get it if they ran hard enough and then I
wouldn’t make errors. It wasn’t a drill, we just played. I knew it was
good for them to try and keep up with me. We did conventional drills
like all of the rest of the teams but we also played a lot, which I
believe in. My philosophy on technique is very simple: I like to call
it the shake and bake! The swing is so simple, racquet ready, elbow in
close to the body, swing straight through and just concentrate on
taking the ball out in front of you. Then match the racquet snap and
release of the forehand to the backhand so they are the same. The older
I have gotten, the more I understand and the simpler it seems to me
It’s not rocket science, squash is simple. Obviously it helps a lot to
be able to move well but it’s all about ball control.”
SEIZING THE MOMENT
Both Quibell and McLeod frequently played with Talbott in
the mornings in addition to the team practice sessions in the
afternoons, and both were at the top of their formidable games when
Yale hosted Trinity on January 21st in the first real test of the
season for either team. The matches were closely contested right from
the start, to the point where from early on, every time Talbott and
Trinity’s long-time coach Wendy Bartlett passed each other as they
circulated from one match to the next, they would make comments to each
other along the lines of “This is going to wind up 5-4.” The Bantams
still had an excellent team but they had lost the Nos. 6-9 players from
the year before, all of whom had either graduated, transferred or were
abroad, while Yale’s starting nine had gotten even stronger since the
teams had last met 11 months earlier in the 2003 Howe Cup final due to
the addition of freshmen McLeod, McCrery and Rapisarda at the Nos. 3, 6
and 7 positions respectively. On this day, Trinity swept the Nos. 4-6
spots and got a win at No. 2 as well when Lynn Leong, a former World
Junior finalist and the runner-up as well to her teammate Helal in the
2002 Individuals tournament, out-played Gross in four games.
For its part, Yale swept the Nos. 7 through 9 spots, with
Rapisarda, Doline and Coleman winning nine of their 10 combined games
(in five of which the opponent scored four points or fewer), and got a
straight-set victory as well at No. 3 from McLeod, whose retrieving
skills and all-around athleticism were much too much for her Bantam
opponent Vaidehi Reddy to handle. This left the team outcome hanging on
the No. 1 match between the reigning two-time Individuals champion
Helal and Quibell. The latter, like many of her teammates, was
infinitely more ready to play a match of this importance than she had
been the last time she was in this situation, at the dual meet against
Hall of Harvard the prior winter. She had been blessed competitively
with a strong mind and an excellent athletic gene pool: her mother,
Lana, had reached the top 15 in the world in amateur ballroom dancing
representing her native South Africa and later was for many years the
squash professional at the Concourse Athletic Club in Atlanta. After
learning the basics of the game from her mother, Michelle had received
expert coaching during her high-school years from former WPSA pro and
several-times U. S. national age-group champion Tom Rumpler, and
subsequently had worked as well with Richard Millman. Even back then
her exceptional athletic gifts had been apparent, especially in an
exercise known as the “beep drill,” in which players sprinted in
various directions in response to the dictates of an instrument that
made a beeping sound whenever the operator pressed the button. Quibell
dominated this drill, demonstrating a quickness off the mark and
ability to change direction that was far superior to even the boys in
her age category, in addition to which she possessed an intrinsic
“feel” for the squash ball and a natural touch with her racquet that
few could rival.
With the learning experiences of her freshman year now
under her belt, Quibell came into her sophomore season in general, and
the Helal match in particular, much stronger, both physically and
mentally, than she had ever been, and after splitting the first two
games in front of a packed-to-the-rim gallery she seized the moment by
running away with the third and close-out fourth games, 9-2 and 9-3.
McDonough vividly recalled what a thrilling and forever-bonding moment
it was as she and her entire array of teammates sat on the ground just
behind the glass back wall, each of them with her arms linked to the
teammates to her left and right, forming a human chain and cheering
their best player on as she exuberantly sprinted across the finish line
prior to being mobbed by her teammates when they dashed into the court
just after the last ball had been struck. Also, it is a telling tribute
to the enormous depth of the Yale roster that season, the result of how
successful Talbott’s recruiting efforts had been throughout the
preceding several years, that there were actually not nine but 16
matches played that day (representing the entire Yale roster), and Yale
swept not only the official Nos. 7 though 9 positions but all seven of
the matches behind them as well, with (in order of their position on
the ladder) Shiels, Dalzell, Schroll, McDonough, Kelley, Mandel and
Epstein all triumphing, in each case three games to love.
This team-wide achievement was celebrated, not only this
afternoon but throughout the season, by the numerous sets of team
members’ parents who were in attendance so frequently, and with so much
enthusiasm, even often at away matches, that they actually became a
significant part of the team, and certainly a part of the entire Yale
women’s squash presentation. This was especially true of those parents,
of which there were quite a few, who were located in the New York/New
Jersey/Philadelphia corridor. On weekends when Yale hosted the Howe
Cup, several families would arrive Friday afternoon, book a room at the
Holiday Inn on Tower Parkway (a five-minute walk from Payne Whitney)
and spend the entire weekend, and they would also arrive bearing
quantities of food for the players. The Colemans often brought hummus
platters, the Dolines prepared sloppy Joes and veggie platters and Jane
Dalzell would bake brownies and Y-shaped cookies. After both that ’04
season and the equally-successful 2004-05 season that followed, Marj
Coleman created substantially-sized collages of each of those seasons
in which she interspersed candid photos of team players with passages
from the Yale Daily News articles chronicling their victories. Bill and
Susan McDonough hosted a team dinner at their home in Summit, North
Jersey, while the team was traveling to an away match at Princeton, and
Peter and Susan Gross did the same when the team went to Philadelphia
for their match against Penn. Like these sets of parents, the Schrolls
and Epsteins were also frequent dual meet attendees, whether at the
Brady Center or on the road. That season also witnessed both the
creation of tee shirts which announced, presciently as it turned out,
“In 2003 We Knocked On The Door….In 2004 We’re Going To Kick It Down,”
and the emergence of a pre-match team cheer, “Hoo-ah,” from the movie
Scent Of A Woman. As Schroll explained, “It's an army term meaning
‘affirm.’ So when a commander orders you to do something, you say
‘Hoo-ah’ and go do it.”
In the aftermath of the dual meet win over Trinity, Yale
breezed through the remainder of the schedule, handily defeating
Harvard 7-2 (with Quibell and Gross out-playing Hall and Wilkins, in
each case in four games, as would also happen in Yale’s 6-3 win over
Harvard in the Howe Cup semis 10 days later) to clinch the Ivy League
title. In the run-up to the Howe Cup there was a team meeting, which
gave the upperclassmen the chance to impress on the newcomers the
importance of the upcoming tournament, just to make sure that everyone
was on the same page and fully committed to the looming stretch run.
Almost inevitably, Yale and second seed Trinity marched through the
draw to the February 22nd final. Just prior to the introductions, in a
marked contrast between the teams’ preparatory approaches, the Lady
Bantams lined up on the Brady Court quietly and with serious
expressions on their faces as they readied for the challenge ahead,
while in the Yale team room, the players were dancing on the couches
with their two favorite songs (“Don’t Stop Believing,” by Journey and
“Hey Ya!” by OutKast) blasting away in the background, just as they had
done a few weeks earlier prior to the dual-meet clash with the same
opponent, and just as they did before a number of their home matches
throughout that whole season.
WILLPOWER
When play began, Trinity again garnered the middle trio of
matches, which were balanced by wins from Doline and Coleman at Nos. 8
and 9 and McLeod’s repeat win over Reddy at No. 3. On the Brady Court,
Gross fell behind Leong, whom she had never defeated, two games to love
and 5-1 in the third, while Rapisarda, who had spent much of the prior
week battling a case of the flu that had sidelined her during the first
two rounds of the tournament, was forced to deal as well with a pulled
muscle in the right side of her rib-cage incurred during a violent
coughing spell that made it especially difficult for her to reach up
for an overhead volley. Her questionable physical state, combined with
the imposing deficit confronting Gross, caused considerable concern
within the Yale camp, since the Lady Bulldogs knew they needed at least
a split of those two matches for Quibell’s impending match with Helal
to make a difference in the team outcome.
That Gross and Rapisarda would BOTH win seemed improbable at
best at this juncture, especially after Rapisarda failed to convert a
game-ball in her opening game with Fernanda Rocha and lost 9-8. But the
plucky Yale freshman bounced back to take the next two games against
Rocha before losing the fourth. Meanwhile, Gross was staging a
momentous comeback of her own, forcing her lithe Malaysian opponent out
of her comfort zone, eliciting a series of errors en route to an 8-0
spurt that rescued the third game and carried her through the 9-7
fourth. Trinity College’s men coach Paul Assaiante, whose squad was in
the midst of a 13-year skein (from 1999 through 2011) of Potter
Cup championships, the longest-lasting dynasty in the history of
college squash, was in the gallery that afternoon to support Coach
Bartlett and the Trinity College women. He later remarked on the
drama and the contrast between the two players, with Leong the quiet,
self-contained control player, flitting around seemingly
effortlessly like a graceful butterfly and conjuring up sinewy
angles with her deft ball placement, while Gross was the voluble and
emotive power player, determination oozing out of every pore, a true
Bulldog and never more so than this afternoon. McCrery, watching from
the gallery, saw Leong’s resolve gradually melt away as the fifth game
wore on to its eventual 9-6 conclusion, and she later described Gross
as “a warrior. Every ball was hers and if she didn’t get one the next
ball was hers for sure. She simply willed her way past Leong.”
An ecstatic Gross, whose Summer 2003 decision to
significantly upgrade her conditioning level in preparation for her
sophomore season found its full reward in her dramatic comeback win
over the vaunted Leong, told a Yale Daily News reporter that, “In such
a long match I think it comes down to who is fitter and who wants it
more. And I really wanted to win.”
So did both Rapisarda and her fellow freshman Rocha, who by the
time Gross-Leong ended were locked in a death-grip and had to have
realized how crucial their match had become from the way the number of
onlookers suddenly tripled as their fifth game was beginning way down
the hallway on Court 12. Rapisarda and her classmate McCrery had formed
a special connection during that season in spite of the fact that they
frequently opposed each other in challenge matches, and they had spent
the evening before the Howe Cup final roaming the campus and reminding
their friends to show up the next day. They also had begun a
ritual before big matches of painting Y’s and ‘04’s on each other’s
cheeks, and, when an exhausted Rapisarda exited the court after losing
the fourth game against Rocha, it was McCrery who tended to her and
gave her a rousing “you can do this!” pep talk before the fifth game
began. By this time, with the Yale supporters massed on one side of the
gallery and the large Bantam cheering section on the other, there
wasn’t even a pretext of subtlety, as both players whaled away at the
ball in a fifth game that became an endless series of lengthy
last-person-standing exchanges that was going to go to the player who
was better able to stay focused or who more often was able to power the
ball into a deep-court nick and/or avoid errors. Enmeshed in a brutal
battle of attrition at a time when she was nowhere near 100%, Rapisarda
found herself gasping for breath and leaning on her racquet after
almost every point, frequently appearing to be on the verge of complete
exhaustion.
Rocha was clearly feeling the strain as well, and both
players responded brilliantly to the mind-bending exigencies of the
moment as the game seesawed cruelly along, with the court enveloped
throughout that game in a ferocious crowd-reaction din after every
point --- until finally Rapisarda was able to torturously boot-strap
her way to a 9-5 win that clinched the 2004 Howe Cup crown for the
delirious Yalies and reduced the Quibell-Helal match (which Helal won)
to a meaningless “dead rubber.”
Coach Assaiante’s analysis of this pair of climactic
matches was that the endings were “like two exhausted heavyweight
fighters throwing haymakers in the 15th round. The Trinity players were
trying to move the ball around and play classic squash, while the Yale
players kept running everything down and hammering away, and ultimately
the Trinity players wilted under the Yale physicality.” McLeod, who had
scored Yale’s first point of the day and hence had a front-row view as
both the Gross and Rapisarda matches reached their culmination,
emphasized that if there was a single animating theme of the entire
season, it was how bonded together that team was, and that no better
expression of that phenomenon existed than what happened during the
fifth games of those two matches. “We pulled like crazy for each
other,” she said. “We fought like lions for one another. Kate couldn’t
breathe, looked ready to collapse, yet she kept playing, kept fighting.
There was SO much heart on that team.”
Quibell and Helal would meet for the final time that
season two weeks later in the final round of the Intercollegiate
Individual championships at St. Lawrence, where Helal’s attempt for a
three-peat would be brusquely denied when Quibell took the first game
9-5, arm-fought her way through the second 10-8 in what would prove to
be the defining sequence of the match, and never looked back, racing
through the third game 9-3. Quibell had straight-gamed Trinity’s Reddy
in her semi, while Helal had done the same to McLeod, who in her
quarterfinal match had rallied from two games to love down against
Gross.
MOVING ON
With Quibell’s triumph over Helal at St. Lawrence, the Yale
2003-04 season ended with the Elis going undefeated wire to wire,
capturing college women’s squash “Triple Crown” (Ivy League title,
regular-season national title, Howe Cup title) and returning the
Individuals trophy to New Haven for the first time since Berkeley
Belknap had won this event 13 years earlier in 1991. It also ended with
Talbott writing a letter to the Board of the Skillman Associates in
July in which, while announcing that for personal and family-related
reasons he had decided to resign his position at Yale, he emphasized
what a privilege it had been to coach the finest team in the land. The
letter concluded, “I can’t thank everyone enough for the overwhelming
support you have shown me and my family over the past six years. It has
been an honor to have been part of the Yale tradition of greatness.”
Ultimately, while Talbott moved on --- and is, as of this
September 2016 writing, about to enter his 13th season as the men’s and
women’s squash coach at Stanford University in Palo Alto, while still
running summer squash camps at the Talbott Squash Academy and at
Stanford --- the legacy he established during his tenure at Yale
propelled the team (coached that year and up to the present time by his
brother Dave, who for the past 12 years and counting has been both the
Yale men’s and women’s coach) to a second straight Triple Crown season
in 2004-05, which again ended with Quibell capturing the Individuals in
a convincing four-game final at Dartmouth over Harvard No. 1 Kyla
Grigg. Throughout that match, and especially in the way she dominated
the final three games (9-1, 2 and 5) after narrowly dropping the 9-7
opener, Quibell, in a compelling display of the mobility she had first
demonstrated in the beep drill a half-dozen years earlier, pounced on
every loose ball so early and punished it to such telling effect, that
Grigg (who would win this tournament two years later as a senior in
2007) became increasingly overwhelmed by the pace her opponent was
setting. Afterwards, Grigg’s Harvard teammate Audrey Duboc, herself a
victim of Quibell’s relentless march through that draw in the round of
16, described the final as “a great, great match. Quibell broke Kyla
down. She is a steady, focused player who is hard to crack. There is no
freebie with that girl.”
A third consecutive Howe Cup title followed in
2005-06, the only national-champion three-peat in the history of Yale
squash, men’s or women’s. Hampered throughout her Yale career by
lower-back and upper-leg injuries, Rachita Vora decided to forgo her
senior season, but her classmates Quibell and Gross won the deciding
matches in Yale’s 5-4 2006 Howe Cup final-round triumph over Trinity
College on a day in which Rapisarda again contributed an important
victory as well. Quibell’s match with Reddy and Gross’s with Ashley
Clackson ended almost simultaneously after Trinity had taken a 4-3
lead. Later that year, Dave Talbott was awarded the prestigious
President’s Cup “to the person who has made substantial, sustained and
significant contributions to the game of squash,” which had been
bestowed on Mark Talbott 17 years earlier in 1989, the only time that
two members of the same family have received this award.
Gross, who during the summer of 2005 won the Individual
gold medal at the quadrennial Maccabiah Games in Israel, and her
classmate and close friend Quibell were named co-winners of the Special
Coaches Award in the spring of 2006 for their career-long contributions
to Yale women’s squash. In addition to her formidable on-court
accomplishments and the strength of her personality, Gross also was
known for supporting, encouraging and inspiring her teammates (who
elected her team captain her senior year), including
upperclassmen, and actively helping them improve their games with the
coaching tips and in-match advice she frequently provided, while
Quibell, named team MVP for the third time in her four years, rebounded
from a knee/hamstring issue that had caused her to lose in the quarters
of the 2006 Individuals by advancing to the final of the U. S.
Nationals (which were held at the Brady Squash Center that year) a few
weeks later in her final official appearance on the Yale squash courts.
She was also selected as the recipient of the Betty Richey Award, the
highest honor in women’s college squash, given to the player “who best
exemplifies the ideals of squash in her love of and devotion to the
game, strong sense of fairness, excellence of play, contributions and
leadership.” Frances Ho had won this award one year earlier, and Elis
Kat McLeod and Miranda Ranieri ’08 would receive the Richey Trophy in
2007 and 2008 respectively, resulting in four consecutive years that a
Yale player had been accorded this distinction --- never before (or
since) had a school been represented on this prestigious list more than
two years in a row.
Quibell played one more competitive season after
graduation, during which she earned a spot on the three-person U. S.
team that competed in the quadrennial Pan American Games along with
Natalie Grainger and Latasha Khan, before deciding to focus on her
business career. She is currently a Strategy Program Officer in the
field of Agricultural Development at the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation in Seattle. Quibell is Yale’s only two-time Intercollegiate
Individuals champion and she is universally, and deservedly, regarded
as the best player in the history of Yale women’s squash. Her 2006
classmate Illingworth, who won the first two of his record nine S. L.
Green championships (2005-2012 and 2014) during his junior and senior
years at Yale, holds a similar distinction regarding Yale men’s squash,
and at their graduation ceremony they both received the highest
athletic Award bestowed on a male and female graduating senior
respectively, namely the William Neely Mallory Award (for men) and the
Nellie Pratt Elliot Award (for women), each of whose inscriptions
states that it is meant to go to that graduating senior who both on the
athletic arena and in the rest of their lives “best represents the
highest ideals of sportsmanship and Yale tradition.” In the history of
Yale athletics, this is the sole occasion in which two practitioners of
the same sport have both won these awards in the same year.
“JUST BY BEING MARK TALBOTT”
Mark Talbott left behind not only an outstanding group of
returning players for his brother to coach to further championships,
but also a culture that permeated the entire program and is
perhaps unique in the history of college squash. In assessing their
years in the program, even from a distance of more than a decade, one
player after another cited the depth of Talbott’s commitment, how
genuine and warm and caring he was, how he devoted as much time and
energy to the players lower down on the ladder as he did to the stars,
how he would play with any of them at any time when their academic
obligations prevented them from attending the mid-afternoon official
team practice. Talbott has been invited to almost every one of his
former players’ weddings, and he always sits not with the bride’s
parents but with her friends, many of whom, of course, were players he
coached. It was largely due to Talbott’s character that, to quote
Dalzell, “there wasn’t a single selfish player on the team. Everyone
loved Mark and played their guts out for him.” McDonough, whose loyalty
to the program was such that Talbott made her the recipient of the
Coaches Special Award “to that player who has by her sportsmanship and
determination done the most for women’s squash at Yale” after both her
junior and senior seasons, exemplified this quality when she was asked
what the highlight of her career was. Her remarkably selfless and
generous response was that it was not anything that she herself
accomplished but rather that the highlight of HER career was QUIBELL’S
’04 dual-meet win over Helal, since that match, in McDonough’s words,
“got Yale over the hump” and launched the Elis to the Howe Cup
championship(s) that followed. In the spring of 2014, McDonough
traveled to Yale for her 10th reunion and visited the Brady Center. The
sight of Marj Coleman’s collage of the 2003-04 season (which was
hanging on a wall near the courts), and the memories it evoked, caused
her to “dissolve in tears” as she relived her experience of that
magical season.
Ultimately, probably the best summation of Talbott’s
coaching career at Yale, and of how revered and beloved a figure he was
to his players and to everyone associated with the program, was
provided by Gina Wilkinson, Talbott’s first recruit and the captain of
the 2002-03 team. Asked to discuss some specific matches that
took place during her time at Yale, she instead responded, “The real
story is not this match or that match, but rather that one of the most
legendary athletes in the history of the world came to coach women’s
squash at Yale. In what other sport does the number one player in the
world for 12 years running coach a college women's team? Mark came to
Yale's program at a time when it wasn't thriving and didn't have a
reputation for being a competitive team. Why did he do it? Not for
accolades. Mark is the most humble, positive and selfless person I've
ever met. That's who he was as a coach too. He wasn't a hard-driving
leader. It was through his quiet strength and his example that he grew
the program to the best in the country.”
“He transformed the program just by being Mark Talbott. He
attracted the top players through his reputation and relationships and
motivated us all to work our hardest, because we wanted to do it for
him and for our teammates. He was still in incredible shape and worked
out the hardest of all of us. ‘Everyone needs a hero’ referred to Mark,
who was not only our coach but also our hero --- it was part respect
and part complete adoration for such an important and successful person
in our sport.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I would like
to thank the Skillman Associates and its President Zerline Goodman ’84,
for authorizing this project, as well as current Yale men’s and women’s
coach Dave Talbott for coordinating it. I am especially grateful to the
many Yale women’s players during the Mark Talbott Coaching Era who
enthusiastically granted interviews, as their reminiscences and
memories are the essence of this document. They are, in order of their
year of graduation, Marion Ringel Panas ’99, Carla Shen ’99, Loren
Smith Dinger ’00, Betsy Cleveland Fenzel ’01, Jen Field ’01, Liese
Fritze Brown ’01, Catherine Fiederowicz ’01, Thea Handelman ’01, Anna
Nordberg ’01, Miriam Fishman ’02, Kate Sands Mascarenhas ’02, Gina
Wilkinson Olsen ’03, Devon Dalzell Layedra ’04, Abbie McDonough ’04,
Abby Epstein Schumer ’05, Lauren Doline Feigenblatt ’05, Frances Ho
’05, Ruth Kelley ’05, Lindsay Schroll ’05, Amy Gross ’06, Michelle
Quibell ’06,Rachita Vora ’06, Lauren McCrery ’07, Catherine “Kat’
McLeod ’07, Kate Rapisarda ’07 and Nicky Shiels ’07. Thanks as well to
Trinity College head coaches Paul Assaiante and Wendy Bartlett; to Tom
Rumpler, head squash pro at the Windy Hill Athletic Club in Atlanta; to
former Harvard head coach Bill Doyle; to Josh Schwartz ‘05, captain of
the 2004-05 Yale men’s team, and to Lisa Tilney ’93, who served as a
volunteer assistant coach to the Yale women’s team from 1998-2001 while
pursuing a Masters in Architecture at the Yale School of Architecture,
all six of whom provided valuable background information and
perspective. Lastly, I appreciate the contributions of Yale “squash
parents” Marjorie Coleman P ‘05, who invited me to her home so that I
could view the collages she created of the 2003-04 and 2004-05
championship seasons; Drs. Fred Dalzell P ’04 and Stuart Doline P ‘05,
for the interviews that I had with them; and Paul Rapisarda P ‘07, for
arranging to send me some extremely helpful articles about that era.
