Princeton Club Edges Harvard Club In NY Squash Metropolitan A League Playoff Finals
by Rob Dinerman
Dateline April 23rd --- Trailing one game to love and a few points behind in mid-second against a three-time U. S. Nationals finalist, 2012 Princeton captain Chris Callis determinedly forged his way to an immensely hard-earned four-game victory over Richard Chin Monday night in the deciding match to give the Princeton Club a 2-1 win over the Harvard Club in the final round of the New York Squash A League playoffs for the 2012-13 season. Callis was able to come up with small but decisive spurts in the middle of the second game and the end-portion of both the third and fourth to secure the triumph.
The host Harvard Club, which had qualified for the final by defeating Sports Club/LA while the Princeton Club was doing the same in their semifinal against StreetSquash, gained the early lead when Harvard Club assistant pro Sat Seshadri out-lasted Kimlee Wong in a match at the No. 2 posiiton that was characterized by several marked swings in momentum. Seshadri was ablaze through the opening pair of 11-7, 11-3 games, racing around the court with abandon and pulling off a bunch of nervy winners, while Wong, one of the “Three Amigos” Princeton class of 2009 (whose other two members were Hisham El_Halaby and Mauricio Sanchez) that won the Ivy League title and reached the Potter Cup national-team-championship finals all four years, was mostly on the defensive and unable to cope with the pace at which Seshadri was operating. But Seshadri’s game has a tendency to run hot and cold, and at 2-1 in the third, after an amazing but enervating series of consecutive gets on a point he wound up losing anyway when he hit himself with the ball, his output noticeably sagged, creating an opening which Wong promptly seized with a 9-0 run to 10-2 that effectively sealed that game and carried through the 11-8 fourth. No one knew what to expect in the fifth, whose first point, a front-court cat-and-mouse exchange, ended on a spectacular Seshadri forehand cross-drop, followed almost immediately by an unforced Wong tin. Swiftly the score grew to 7-0 and Sesadri was well on his way to an eventual 11-3 win.
The action then shifted to the adjoining court where No. 3 players Reed Endresen, the Harvard captain in 2011, and Will Cheng engaged in a well-played but quieter four-game battle marked by many exchanges concentrated along the left wall and good positional parrying. Cheng took the opening pair of games, the second in a 14-12 tiebreaker after Endresen had barely ticked the top of the tin to get Cheng to game-ball, but Endresen’s play got noticeably sharper as he made off with the third. Cheng’s game is thoughtful and fundamentally sound, and an accumulation of advantages enabled him to establish just enough of a cushion as the fourth game progressed, abetted by some costly Endresen errors, to give the Princeton Club the point they needed to counter-balance the Seshadri-Wong outcome.
By the time that match had ended, Chin and Callis were well into their No. 1 and deciding match, which devolved into a fascinating contrast of styles, as well as a war of nerves, tactics and attrition. Now well into his mid-40’s and a dozen years removed from his third and last advance to the final of the U. S. Nationals (in which he pushed Damian Walker to a fifth game in 2001), Chin’s game is endlessly wise, featuring a thousand tiny cuts as he constantly probes for and exploits small openings, varying his shot selection just enough to keep his opponent wary and off balance. Callis, a veteran (as is his former Tiger teammate Wong) of multiple 5-4 Potter Cup final-round battles with Trinity College, has a game mature well beyond his years but also possesses a degree of firepower and explosive athleticism that was strenuously tested throughout the evening but that spelled the difference in the end as he engineered a four-point skein from 4-5 to 8-5 in the second game and persevered in the closing parts of the third and fourth as well, in the latter case largely due to a trio of perfectly-angled tin-defying backhand working-boast winners to cap off an exhausting but highly satisfying victory for both himself and his Princeton Club team.
Match Summary: Princeton Club 2, Harvard Club 1
2. Sat Seshadri (HC) d Kimlee Wong (PC, 3-2
3. Will Cheng (PC) d Reed Endresen (HC), 3-1
1. Chris Callis (PC) d Richard Chin (HC), 3-1
Back To Main
