Patrice McConnell Cromwell, 1962-2024, Two-Time Captain Of Princeton’s National Championship Teams by Rob Dinerman
photo linkedin
Dateline August 29, 2024
--- DSR is sad to learn of the passing earlier this week of Patrice
McConnell Cromwell at age 62 after a nearly decade-long battle with
ovarian cancer. As an “alumna” of the vaunted Heights Casino junior
program run by Fred and Carol Weymuller during the 1970’s, she and her
younger sister Alicia, along with teammates Karen Kelso, Kathy Castle
and Diana Staley, comprised the U. S. team that won the 1980 World
Junior Team Championships in Sweden.
Shortly thereafter Patrice McConnell began what became a truly
praiseworthy career at Princeton, where she was a top-tier member of
Tiger teams that won the Howe Cup (emblematic of the women’s college
national team championship) in 1981, 1983 and 1984, serving as the
team’s captain both her junior and senior years and playing No. 1
throughout her final three seasons. McConnell won the deciding match in
4-3 victories against both Harvard in the 1982 dual meet (with a
fourth-game overtime win over her former Heights Casino club-mate Mary
Hulbert) and in a Howe Cup match-up against Yale’s higher-ranked
Zerline Goodman.
But McConnell’s varsity Princeton career is perhaps best remembered for
an act of true leadership that she showed off the court rather than on.
In a touching moment during the trophy presentation after Princeton had
won the 1984 Howe Cup (using nine players in the process rather than
seven due to mid-tournament injuries), she did something that
exemplified what made her such an admired leader and beloved figure
among her teammates and coach. Each player on a Howe Cup-winning team
is given a miniature Howe Cup in recognition of the accomplishment.
But, since only seven trophies were available for the seven players who
normally represented their school in this event, there were not enough
cups to go around, and by the time the presenter reached Risa Williams
at the end of the line, all of the cups had already been handed out to
her teammates. Seeing this, McConnell, who hadn’t dropped a game all
weekend and whose 3-0 victory over Harvard’s No. 1 Staley had
established an early tone for Princeton’s milestone tenth Howe Cup
crown, stepped forward without a moment’s hesitation and, without
saying a word, she handed her cup over to Williams. “That tells you
everything you need to know about Patrice McConnell,” her teammate
Joanne Sherry said years later in recounting this incident. Sherry
herself had spent the first semester of that year in Italy as part of
Princeton’s Semester Abroad program, and when she returned in January,
McConnell organized a team party to welcome her back. It was gestures
like these that caused Betty Constable, Princeton’s legendary women’s
squash coach, to identify McConnell as by far the best captain she ever
had during her 20-year tenure from 1971-91.
For the past 19 years, she has worked at the Annie E. Casey Foundation,
an organization dedicated to advancing youth economic success, where
she ultimately held the position of Vice President of the Center for
Economic Opportunity. She also continued to play squash after she
graduated, mostly in the Baltimore area, where she settled with her
husband, David Cromwell. The couple had three children --- Caitlin,
David Jr., captain and a top player at Middlebury College and later an
assistant coach there, and Mae, a two-time squash captain at Amherst
College --- who survive her, as do her mother Jane and siblings Michael
and Alicia, a seven-time U.S. National Singles champion with whom
Patrice teamed up to win the U.S. National 40-and-over Doubles
Championship in 2010. Patrice McConnell Cromwell was one of the most
universally popular players and citizens in the U.S. squash community,
and she will be sorely missed.
