Quaker Meeting House (QMH) has some thoughts as he tries to figure out where to start after arguably the best week he can remember in 19 years at Penn…
*Seriously, if you don't follow Penn Athletics closely, this week—more appropriately, this
weekend—was one for the ages. Eleven teams were in action, and it seemed like Friday, Saturday and Sunday was a continuous game of "can you top this" as the programs battled each other for attention with headline performances, both team and individual. The QMH staffers could hardly keep up. Even now, sitting here writing, QMH is doing a lot of "oh yeah, and this happened…and
this happened…holy cow, and
this happened…"
There's so much of it, QMH has decided to split this week's thoughts into two parts. First part now, second part on Wednesday morning. Hope that's ok.
*It's impossible to trump a national championship, so QMH wants to…
has to…start there.
Men's squash. You may recall QMH has talked about them a few times before. Last he checked, the Quakers were dropping a dramatic, hotly contested 5-4 decision at Princeton in the final matches on the Jadwin Gym courts. The decision forced Penn to share the Ivy League title with the Tigers.
Fast forward to this past weekend and the College Squash Association (CSA) Team Championships, held at the impressive Arlen Specter US Squash Center just up the street on Drexel's campus. The format has been slightly altered for the Potter Cup and Howe Cup, the respective college national championship trophies for men's and women's squash, and 12 teams came to Philadelphia to compete over four days in a format that saw the top four seeds get first-round byes.
The Penn men were one of those top four, taking the third seed behind top-seeded Trinity and second-seeded Princeton—coincidentally, the only two teams to beat them during the regular season.
Friday's quarterfinal went about as expected, the Quakers disposing of sixth-seeded Columbia, 8-1.
That set up a rematch with Princeton in Saturday's semifinal round. The day got off to a great start, freshman
Varun Chitturi flipping his result from a few weeks ago by winning in four. A huge point came next from sophomore
Omar Hafez, who fell behind 2-1 in games but rallied to dominate the fourth and fifth a 3-2 win and another point. The third match to finish was another reversal from the Old Nassau tussle, junior
Nathan Kueh avenging his five-game loss with a dominating sweep. Just like that, Penn was up, 3-0. Shortly after that,
Rehan Luthra fell at No. 9 but
Nick Spizzirri was victorious at No. 1 and the Quakers needed just one more match to close things out.
On February 10, Penn had that same scenario and couldn't do it. On Saturday, the Quakers did…barely,
Dana Santry and
Abdelrahman Dweek both went five games in their matches, but it was Princeton that prevailed in both, Santry falling 11-6 at No. 7 and Dweek getting edged 12-10 at No. 4. That left things in the hands of freshman
Salman Khalil at No. 2 and junior
Roger Baddour at No. 8.
Khalil lost his first game. Baddour lost
his first game. But then here came Khalil, the Ivy League Rookie of the Year dominating Game 2 to tie his match at 1-1. What followed was an epic battle in Game 3, Khalil needing one extra point before closing it out, 12-10. He then finished off his match, and the Penn victory, with an 11-6 victory in Game 4. (Baddour would ultimately lose in three, setting the final at 5-4.)
On to the final, and another chance at revenge…this time with Trinity, 5-4 winners over the Quakers back on February 4 in Hartford.
What a day Sunday was. QMH arrived at the Specter Center a bit late, and by the time he got there Kueh had already swept his opponent (after a nervy 12-10 win in Game 1), Spizzirri had fallen in four, and Santry had swept his Bantam foe in a match that included a 13-11 win in Game 2.
The second wave of matches featured Khalil and Dweek on the respective exhibition courts, with Baddour playing on one of the side courts. Khalil's match was the first one that QMH saw, and while the freshman won 3-0 it was anything but a cakewalk, the game scores going 11-8 and 11-8 before he rode out an 11-4 victory in Game 3.
Dweek, meanwhile, lost his first game, roared to an 11-5 win in the second, then battled to an 11-9 win in Game 3 that seemed to completely deflate his Trinity opponent. Game 4 was barely a contest, the junior rolling 11-2.
At that point, the score was 4-1 in Penn's favor and all eyes were on Court 6 where Baddour and Trinity's Khamal Cumberbatch were engaged in a match that QMH can only describe with one word: epic.
Baddour won the first game but needed an extra point to do so, taking it 12-10. Cumberbatch came back to win Game 2, 11-7. The third game went back and forth for a bit, but Baddour gained control late and took an 11-8 decision. The fourth game was another taut affair, but once again Baddour took a late lead and, at 10-8, it was "match ball" and the national championship was on his racquet.
Then it wasn't.
Then it was.
Then it wasn't, again.
Then it
was, again. And again. And again. And again. And, yes,
again.
Baddour had eight match balls.
Eight. Cumberbatch fought off every last one of them. It was one of the most heroic and courageous things QMH has ever witnessed in person. He was so moved by the effort, he felt compelled to have a word with Cumberbatch following the trophy presentation. (He wasn't the only one; several people stopped the Bantam captain to commend him on his effort.)
As the points wore on, as championship points were gained and then lost, the tension continuously built. This was a heavyweight battle. The players were exhausted and could barely move between points, finding any sort of way to delay play and catch a breath, but once that ball was served they summoned up the energy and guts to play on. At a certain point, it didn't even feel like sport. It was a spectacle.
Meanwhile, the next matches on the exhibition courts—Hafez on one, Chitturi on the other—were moving along at a solid clip until, QMH realized, all three courts were nearing match ball.
And so it was that Hafez was the man to bring the title to Philadelphia for the first time. His battle with Trinity's Joachim Chuah was another classic, the first two games needing extra points (both won by Hafez, 12-10) and, after the Bantam sophomore rolled through Game 3, the fourth game going past the 11-point mark as well.
QMH can't quite remember, since his head was on such a swivel—at one point someone near him remarked "how am I supposed to keep track of all this?!" as they tried to watch literally every point from three matches in real time—but he thinks Hafez had at least two match balls before he finally put the finishing touches on his 13-11 win. It might have been three. Possibly four.
Mere seconds after that eruption of joy, a shout came from the other exhibition court on the other side of the stands. Chitturi had closed out his match in four, winning the final two games 12-10 and 11-9.
Baddour? He ended up losing that fourth game, 18-16. Luckily for all involved, there was no need for a fifth.
Trust QMH when he tells you this: The scoreline will forever read 7-1, but there were a few minutes—nay,
several minutes—when it felt like the tide was turning in Trinity's favor.
It's the first national title won by a Penn team since the women's squash team won the Howe Cup in 2000, and the first by a men's program since heavyweight crew brought the Ten Eyck Trophy (total team points) home from the IRA National Championship Regatta in 1991.
Perhaps more impressively, it moves Penn into an exclusive club. Prior to Sunday, only five men's squash programs had won the Potter Cup, a competition that has been contested since 1942 and without interruption (except for that pesky COVID year, 2021) since 1947: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Trinity, and…Navy, in 1957, 1959 and 1967 under head coach…Art Potter. (As in Potter Cup!) So yes, the loudest cheer might have gone up during the trophy presentation when the director of the CSA exclaimed "for the longest time, this has been a group of five. Today, we are please to welcome our sixth member!"
If you've followed Penn squash for the last few years, you know how special Sunday was. The program has had its moments, right? There were four wins at the now-defunct Six-Man Championships from 1965-74, and four men have won the individual collegiate title. But until recently the Quakers had been like so many others, on the outside looking in as the Potter Cup made its way from (mostly) Boston, to (mostly) Hartford, to (occasionally) New Haven, and (a little less frequently) to Princeton.
Head coach
Gilly Lane has completely changed the trajectory of the program, to the point that late in 2019 the team was earning its first-ever No. 1 ranking by the CSA and a year later—mere days before the COVID pandemic became a reality—the Quakers were playing for the Potter Cup title for the first time in program history. That day ended in a 6-1 loss to host and defending champion Harvard.
It was two years later—two years ago—when the real heartbreak took place. In a post-COVID world, the Quakers were loaded for bear and ready for their coronation. They had rolled to their first outright Ivy League title since 1969, and this time
they were hosting the Potter Cup in their brand-spanking-new Penn Squash Center. Everything was in place…except Harvard didn't get the memo. The Crimson, now two-time defending champs, reversed the score from the regular-season meeting by winning the final match of the day which broke a 4-4 tie.
Then there's last year. The Potter Cup was played at Trinity, and while the Quakers went into the event seeded second they got the sixth-ranked Bantams at the wrong time in the wrong place in the semifinals round. Once again, the match was all even through eight of the nine matches, but this time the home team got the final win and the final point, Trinity sending the Quakers back to Philly short of their goal for the second straight year.
Against that backdrop, the celebration Sunday when Chuah's final shot sailed over the back wall to clinch Hafez's victory? Overdue, maybe. Deserved, certainly. Cathartic? Absolutely.
For QMH, the best moment came following the formal presentation of the runner-up and championship trophies, and after the obligatory pictures had been taken of the team with the trophy, and the captains, and the coaches. Suddenly, Coach Lane and Director of Squash Jack Wyant were waving everyone wearing red and blue into the exhibition court. They wanted a picture that included everyone who had been there. We were all witnesses.
Take a good look at the picture at the top of this column. Everyone in that picture—alums, donors, administrators, friends, families—everyone had some small role building up to Sunday. To be able to gather such a group for this moment, it was…perfect.
And here's something else you need to know: there may not be a better coach, better person than
Gilly Lane. Here's the kind of guy he is: on Monday night, QMH was at home, eating dinner with Mrs. QMH, when a text rang in on his phone. It was Gilly, thanking QMH for coming to the match and telling him how much it meant that QMH was there. Completely unnecessary—QMH had gotten to spend quality time at the Specter Center with Gilly basking in Sunday's win—but so appreciated. How many other people got similar sentiments? It's little things like that that make him a beloved and respected figure in the Penn and squash communities, among likely many others that QMH doesn't know about.
So yes, lots of amazing things happened this weekend. But that men's squash championship? Yeah, that was the best. On so many levels.
QMH will continue with the rest of an incredible week and weekend tomorrow.
#FightOnPenn
