1984-85 Franklin & Marshall
Men’s Squash Team To Be Inducted Into The F&M Athletics Department
Hall Of Fame by Rob Dinerman Dateline July 7, 2025
--- This past month the Athletics Department at Franklin &
Marshall, a liberal-arts college located in Lancaster, PA,
announced in a press release that its 1984-85 men’s squash team will be
among eight inductees --- and the only team --- comprising its Class of
2025 Hall of Fame. The ceremony is set for Friday evening, September
19th, as part of F&M’s True Blue Weekend festivities. The squash
team, which is being recognized in this fashion on the milestone
40-year anniversary of its accomplishments, was coached that year by
Bill “Doc” Marshall --- who was also F&M’s Director of Athletics at
the time --- and his assistant coaches John Stallings and John
Schellenberg. It compiled a 14-3 record, good enough to be ranked third
in the college team standings, in the process recording its first-ever
victories over both Princeton and Yale and beating Navy for the first
time in 10 years as well.
The seeds for such a successful campaign were actually sown in Autumn
1981, when five talented freshmen --- namely Scott Brehman and Jamie
Minnis from Haverford School’s team that had won the tough Philadelphia
high-school league (known as the Inter-Ac) throughout their high-school
careers, along with Dave Ganek (New York), Ian Ruzow (South Africa) and
Peter Carp (Rochester) --- arrived on campus. They all immediately
moved onto the varsity and acquitted themselves well during that season
and the next. But it was not until the two years that followed, during
which they were joined by three more Haverford School alums --- Morris
Clothier, Chris Spahr and Beau Buford --- along with Geoff Kennedy of
the nearby Hill School and Nat Otis, a talented junior player from New
York, that the Diplomats were ready to metamorphose from a nice
respectable little program into college squash’s top echelon.
By the time the 1984-85 season began, the multiple excellent
early-1980’s recruiting classes were fully ready to liberate themselves
from what had been a second-division schedule (against smaller and
lower-prominence schools like Lehigh, Swarthmore, Haverford College,
etc.) and challenge the first-tier programs. This they demonstrated
shortly before Thanksgiving when they invaded Princeton’s Jadwin
Gymnasium and defeated the Tigers 5-4, despite a Princeton sweep of the
Nos. 2-4 positions. Ganek, Buford and Ruzow countered with a sweep of
the Nos. 7-9 slots, freshman Nat Otis provided an important four-game
win at No. 5 over Donald Coons, and the outcome of the dual meet came
down to the No. 1 match between Clothier and Princeton star Fazal
Sheikh. Clothier took the first two games, but Sheikh dominated the
15-7 third and when he then went up 6-2 in the fourth (to the bellowing
approval of a raucous and overflow crowd), he briefly appeared to have
permanently seized control. However, at this crucial juncture Clothier,
playing his best squash of the day, mounted a 10-0 surge that subdued
the crowd and sealed the eventual 15-11 tally. It was Princeton’s first
loss to any team other than Harvard (which dominated the decade of the
1980’s) in the 11 years since the Tigers had lost to Penn in February
1974.
The victory over Yale that followed, like its Princeton predecessor,
was won on enemy turf and by an F&M last-match-on-court victory
with the team score knotted at 4-all. But this time the most
significant match --- and the only five-gamer of the day --- occurred
in the first shift (the ‘evens” shift, during which the Nos. 2, 4, 6
and 8 matches were contested), rather than the second. It is a
compelling sign of how motivated the team members were to consolidate
the win over Princeton by beating Yale as well that they came back a
week early from the Christmas/New Year’s vacation break in order to
practice twice a day prior to the early-January trip to New Haven.
Brehman, the team captain that year (and its No. 1 player during his
freshman and sophomore years before being displaced from that slot by
Clothier in 1983-84), had been made well aware by the coaching staff
that his match against Yale No. 2 Will Carlin, the Bulldogs’ captain
and a 1983-84 first-team All-American, might well wind up being the
decider. Although impelled by both this message and a desire to redeem
himself after his earlier loss to Princeton’s Luke Evnin, Brehman
nevertheless lost the first two games and trailed Carlin 10-5 in the
third. Although he later acknowledged that at that stage he was “so
embarrassed by my play that I was ready to just walk off the court,”
Brehman somehow was able to turn the match around, rallying to rescue
that game 18-15 and winning the fourth as well, also in a tiebreaker,
17-15. He then fell behind 10-3 in the fifth game before conjuring up
yet another huge comeback that forced a third straight overtime session.
A WHOLE NEW LEVEL OF INTENSITY AND PASSION
By this time the play between these two fiery competitors --- both of
whom were arguably playing the most important match of their respective
college careers --- had reached a whole new level of intensity and
passion. After four fierce and evenly-divided points in the
best-of-nine tiebreaker, Carlin hit a rare unforced tin, following
which Brehman, thrilled at finally being in the lead for the first time
in the entire 90-minute match, conjured up two outright winners to win
that game 18-15. His teammates, inspired by their captain’s gritty
comeback, got an additional win from Spahr at No. 3 over Julian
Benello, along with another No. 7-9 sweep from Ganek, Buford and Ruzow,
whose four-game win (after dropping the first game) over Yale No. 9
Miles Kronby in the final ---and deciding --- match of the day clinched
F&M’s 5-4 victory.
Infused with confidence by this pair of first-ever triumphs over
vaunted Ivy League opponents --- as well as by a 7-2 win over Williams
College later in the afternoon after the victory over the Bulldogs ---
the Diplomats earned a 7-2 home win over Navy two weeks later (as
noted, F&M’s first in a decade against the Midshipmen), in
considerable part due to F&M wins --- by Brehman, Otis, Minnis and
Buford --- in all four of the day’s matches that went to a fifth game.
Three of those four F&M five-game winners (all but Otis) rallied
after trailing two games to one, and the victories by both Spahr and
Ganek were by two points in the close-out fourth game. Buoyed by this
series of airtight victories over longtime nemeses, the team romped to
an 8-1 win over a Penn team that F&M had never beaten until one
year earlier, ahead of a memorably compressed two-day, four-stop
undefeated road trip in which they boarded the team van at 7am on a
late-January Friday morning for the five-hour drive that got them
to Hobart College for a 3pm dual meet, following which they drove to
Rochester for an 8pm match that evening against the Yellow Jackets.
After spending the night in Rochester, they drove the next morning to
Ithaca, where they out-played both Cornell and Army before finally
traveling home (and getting delayed several hours along the way when
the van’s headlights failed) and getting back to campus well after
midnight, having notched a quartet of 9-0 tallies in less than 25
hectic hours.
The only three 1984-85 F&M losses were to an invincible
Harvard team that lost only nine total matches in its 11 dual meets, to
Trinity College --- a dual meet in which F&M never recovered from
the serious mid-match right-knee injury sustained by Kennedy that
forced him to default to his opponent, John Conway (whom Kennedy was
leading, two games to one), and sidelined him for the rest of the
season --- and in a return engagement with Navy, this one in Annapolis,
in which the team had to deal with not only Kennedy’s absence but a
bout of food poisoning that affected several team members as well.
There were also four 3-2 matches in this dual meet, but this time they
were split 2-2, whereas in the initial encounter between these two very
evenly matched teams --- which wound up tied for third place in the
nine-man team rankings, behind Harvard and Trinity College --- F&M,
as mentioned, had gone 4-0.
In the season-ending six-man Intecollegiate Tournament at West
Point, F&M placed seventh, led by the advance of Clothier to the
quarterfinals by virtue of his simultaneous-match-point round-of-16 win
over Tufts star Sakhi Khan, the son of former North American Open and
British Open champion Mohibullah Khan. Clothier was named a first-team
All-American, while Brehman and Spahr both made Honorable Mention
All-American and were voted co-MVP’s for the season. Returning
lettermen Clothier, Spahr, Kennedy, Buford and Otis, all of whom were
either freshmen or sophomores in 1984-85, formed the core of an F&M
roster --- after they were joined in the next year or two by Aashish
Khamat, Yogesh Panchal and Sam Crew ---- which finished second in the
nation (behind only Harvard) in 1986-87. That latter team, which was
inducted into the Franklin & Marshall Athletic Hall of Fame in
2012, will now be joined in that distinction by the 1984-85 contingent.
STELLAR POST-COLLEGE SQUASH CAREERS
Not surprisingly, a significant number of F&M’s squash team members
during this mid-1980’s period have enjoyed stellar post-college squash
careers, which to an impressive degree are still active even today,
four decades later, as witness the large number of both trophies and
battle scars that they have accumulated along the way during that
lengthy time span. Clothier, the only F&M player to make first-team
All-American in all four of his college years, attained the semis of
the U.S. Nationals in both his junior and senior years (as well as the
semis of the Intercollegiate Individuals as a senior) and has
subsequently won the U.S. National Doubles nine times (a record for a
right-wall player), the Canadian National Doubles three times and every
major invitational tournament on the American doubles-squash schedule
multiple times as well. In 2008 he received the President’s Cup,
awarded “for substantial, sustained and significant contributions to
the game of squash.”
Clothier’s classmate (and 1986-87 fellow co-captain) Chris Spahr has
won two U.S. National Doubles age-group championships (both with Doug
Lifford as his partner), more than a dozen Massachusetts State Open and
age-group doubles championships --- including, most memorably, the 2019
Mass State Open Mixed Doubles with his daughter Caroline on
simultaneous-championship point over Will Hartigan and Serena Fagan,
who had led 14-10 --- close to a dozen Father & Son National
Doubles Open and age-group titles with his son (and former Dartmouth
No. 1) Carson; and two Century Mixed Doubles crowns with Mary Belknap.
Spahr, who has served as the Director of Squash at the University Club
of Boston since 1999, was also selected as the 2018 recipient of the US
Squash Sportsmanship Award.
Scott Brehman, in addition to winning a number of important Open
invitational and regional tournaments --- including the Darwin Kingsley
Invitational in 1987, the Atlantic Coast Championships in 1988 and
1989, the Trenton Club Invitational in 1992 and several Philadelphia A
Singles --- and reaching the semis of the 1996 U.S. Nationals, has won
10 William White Doubles age-group titles with a variety of partners.
The most recent one, with Dominic Hughes in January 2025, came just
seven months after Brehman had undergone total-knee-replacement surgery
on his left leg. It was Brehman’s eighth leg/arm surgery overall, and
his fellow top-four 1984-85 teammates Clothier, Spahr and Kennedy have
had a combined five total-joint-replacement operations, with a sixth,
on Kennedy’s right hip, scheduled this coming autumn. Despite Brehman’s
praiseworthy post-college squash achievements, he still to this day
regards his comeback win over Will Carlin in the 1985 F&M-vs.-Yale
dual meet as the highlight of his squash career.
Geoff Kennedy, who spent his first five post-college years as an
assistant squash pro at the Racquet & Tennis Club in Manhattan and
the next seven as the head pro at the Metropolitan Club in Washington
DC, has had so many achievements as a right-wall doubles squash player
--- highlighted by winning the William White Open three times, the
Baltimore Invitational Doubles and Maryland States five times each. the
Virginia States four times and the Silver Racquets in 1996, while also
reaching three Gold Racquets finals and two U.S. National Doubles A
finals --- that in 2008 he was inducted into the Maryland State Squash
Racquets Association Hall of Fame. A substantial number of Kennedy’s
tournament accomplishments (including four Merion Cricket Club
championships) occurred in concert with Beau Buford, who also won the
Silver Racquets in 2001 and 2002 with Scott Butcher and Jesse Sammis as
his respective partners. Nat Otis, besides being Kennedy’s partner in
two of his successful forays in the Baltimore doubles event, reached
the final round of the 1997 Woodruff-Nee Open. Dave Ganek also was an
active player throughout the 1990’s, and in 2014 his $2 million gift
(at the time the largest contribution in the history of US Squash)
established the Ganek Family US Squash Head National Coach position.
FROM RELATIVE OBSCURITY TO A NATIONAL COLLEGE SQUASH POWER
After serving as Assistant Coach to Doc Marshall throughout the
seven-year period from 1980-87, John Stallings and Marshall became the
team’s Co-Coaches for the next four years (1987-91), following which
Marshall ended his lengthy (13-year) squash coaching tenure and
Stallings held the Head Coaching position for the next 16 years before
retiring at the end of the 2006-07 season. It is a revealing sign of
his continuing loyalty to Franklin & Marshall that the school’s
abbreviated letters are embedded in his email address --- and it is a
compelling sign as well of how fondly and proudly the members of that
1984-85 team still remember their experience all these years later that
the entire starting nine has committed to attend September’s Hall of
Fame induction ceremony. The 1984-84 F&M men’s squash team will
always be known for having elevated F&M men’s squash from relative
obscurity to a national college squash power, and for having
jump-started the several excellent years that followed in what was, by
any measure, the most successful extended era in the history of the
program.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rob Dinerman has written hundreds of articles about college squash
during the past several decades, as well as five college-squash books
--- Histories of squash at Harvard 1922-2010, Harvard/Way Era 2010-21,
Princeton, Trinity College and A Century Of Champions: 100 Years Of College Squash, 1923-2023 --- all of which are arrayed on the home page of the robdinerman.com website.
Mr. Dinerman wishes to thank former F&M Head Squash Coach John
Stallings and 1984-85 team members Scott Brehman, Morris Clothier,
Chris Spahr and Geoff Kennedy for the interviews they granted and the
documentation they provided as he was researching this article.
