Mark Fetting, 11/23/54 – 8/9/25, Former Player And Passionate Supporter Of Penn Squash by Rob Dinerman
Photo Courtesy Conor Fetting-Smith
Dateline August 18, 2025
--- We at DSR are sad to report that Mark Fetting, 70, a member of the
University of Pennsylvania’s varsity squash teams during the mid-1970’s
and one of the school’s most devoted squash alums ever since, suffered
a fatal heart attack earlier this month while playing with his
grandchildren in the backyard of his family’s home.
Although Fetting’s maternal uncles Jim and
Joe Lacy compiled an extraordinary record of success as squash doubles
players --- teaming up to win numerous Maryland State and Maryland Club
championships (despite being both left-handed) and being inducted in
1998 as members of the inaugural class of the Maryland State Squash
Racquets Association Hall of Fame --- Fetting himself, despite being an
excellent athlete (and captain of the cross country and basketball
teams) during his high school years at Gilman School, an all-boys
independent school in his native Baltimore, did not take up squash
until his sophomore year at Penn. Nevertheless, inspired by the
legendary longtime Quaker coach Al Molloy, Fetting earned his way onto
the team’s starting nine in both his junior and senior years, and at
the end of his senior 1975-76 season, the Daily Pennsylvanian’s
season wrap-up article noted that both co-captains Gil Mateer and Dave
Heiner “showered praise on the squad’s unsung hero, Mark Fetting.”
Mateer saluted Fetting for “constantly thinking about the team and
always trying to motivate the guys to play the best squash that they
could,” while Heiner called Fetting “the team’s driving force. He was
very encouraging to all of us.”
That passion for Penn squash stayed with
Fetting throughout the entire nearly five remaining decades of his
life, through his marriage to his high school sweetheart Georgia Smith,
through the three children they had --- sons Conor Fetting-Smith and
Noel Fetting-Smith and daughter Carey Fetting-Smith, a star field
hockey player in high school and on the University of North Carolina’s
perennial national powerhouse squads --- and through a highly
successfully business career at Legg Mason in Baltimore, where Fetting
was appointed CEO in 2008 (a role that landed him on the cover of
Barron’s magazine). “Mark was widely admired by colleagues as a
visionary leader, a strategic thinker and, above all, one of the finest
people you could ever meet,” a company spokesman declared earlier this
week. “He brought a sincere sense of honor, responsibility and
stewardship to his role, acting with principles, integrity and
perseverance.”
Those same qualities were on full display
both in the enthusiasm that Fetting brought to his post-college
recreational squash games (which he kept playing until just a few years
ago) and especially to the unwavering support he expressed in a myriad
of ways for the Penn squash program. When there was a period during the
mid-1990’s during which it looked like Title IX pressures might lead to
Penn’s varsity squash program being either reduced to club status or
dropped entirely, Fetting was at the forefront of what proved to be a
successful drive to “rally the troops” that caused Penn squash to
retain its varsity standing. And when Penn men’s teams that seemed
poised to win the national team championship (known as the Potter Cup)
fell agonizingly short in consecutive-year 5-4 losses --- first in the
2022 Potter Cup finals to a Harvard contingent that Penn had defeated
6-3 just a few weeks earlier, and then in the 2023 Potter Cup semis to
an inspired Trinity team playing on its own Hartford turf --- Fetting,
almost alone among his despairing fellow Penn squash alums, never lost
his confidence that success was just around the corner. His faith was
fully borne out when the Quakers broke through to win the Potter Cup in
2023-24 and then successfully defended this championship by recording
the first wire-to-wire undefeated season in the history of Penn men’s
squash in 2024-25.
Accompanying the passion and dedication
that Fetting brought to every activity he undertook was a generosity of
spirit that is perhaps best exemplified by the initiative that he and
his wife took in establishing Camp Brightside on the lakeshore grounds
of their family home at the time, under whose auspices the same group
of approximately 20 children from inner-city Baltimore spent two weeks
hiking, canoeing and biking each summer over the course of a full
decade. Fetting later termed that experience “one of the most impactful
of my life.” It typified what Sister Helen Amos, the Chair of the Mercy
Hospital Board --- one of many on which Fetting served with pride and
distinction --- meant when she said about Fetting that he had what she
called “an unwavering commitment to the underserved.”
Both Penn’s Director of Squash/Head Women’s
Coach Jack Wyant and Gilly Lane, the Head Men’s Coach, expressed great
gratitude for Fetting’s loyalty to Penn squash and tremendous sadness
at his sudden passing. Mark Fetting is survived by his wife and
three children, as well as his four siblings --- John, Margaret, Mary
and Jeannie --- and five grandchildren.
Rob Dinerman has
written five books about college squash, all of which are arrayed on
the home page of the robdinerman.com website. His most recent college
squash book, A Century Of Champions: 100 Years Of College Squash,
1923-2023, was released in March 2024.
