On Lange's plaque: She was a four-time selection as first-team All-America by the College Squash Association (CSA) and a four-time first-team All-Ivy pick, earning Ivy League Player of the Year in 2008-09 and Ivy League Rookie of the Year in 2006-07. She played in the final at the CSA Individual Championships three times and posted a 42-15 record wearing the Red and Blue (21-5 mark in Ivy play). A two-time captain who played No. 1 on the ladder almost exclusively during her career, she led the 2007-08 team which ranked No. 1 nationally, won the Ivy League title, and finished second at the Howe Cup (national team championships). While at Penn, she won the Under-19 U.S. Junior championship.
 
by Terry Toohey
 
Squash isn't a sport people naturally gravitate to, especially if you're from the Northwest part of the country like Penn great Kristen Lange.
 
As Jack Wyant, Lange's college coach put it, squash is largely a Northeast corridor, Amtrak sport, and the numbers bear that out. There are 34 women's varsity programs at the collegiate level and 17 club teams, according to the College Squash Association, the governing body of the sport. Only three of those programs—Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Washington University in St. Louis—are west of the Mississippi River. Among the three, only Stanford is a varsity program; Chicago and Washington are club teams. The rest are in the East, with most of them concentrated in the Northeast corridor.
 
So for a Seattle native like Lange to wind up as a squash player, and an elite one at that, was a bit unusual. Lange has her mom to thank for that.
 
Jackie Lange was an avid racquetball player when the family lived in California and looked for a place to continue playing that sport when the family moved to Seattle when Kristen was a little more than two years old.
 
One day, though, a neighbor suggested that Jackie give squash a try, which she did.
 
"We joined a club (the Pro Sports Club in Bellevue) that had squash, and my mom started playing," said Kristen. "Myself and my two sisters—I'm the middle of three sisters—we would come to the court and color and run about and all this other stuff and make all sorts of mayhem while our mom played. We actually got kicked out of the club at one point because we were such little rascals running around and just causing chaos.
 
"When we got back into the club my mom was like, enough of this rabble rousing, you need to play squash. So when I was about eight years old my mom put a squash racket in my hand and said, 'you're going to do this while I do this.' The rest is history; I took to it like a fish to water."
 
That she did. First, Lange developed into one of the top junior players in the country and then one of the best collegiate players in the nation.
 
In high school, Lange won her age group at the U.S. Junior National championship twice, in 2003 (U15) and 2004 (U17). She also captured the U.S Junior Open championship two times in the U17 (2004) and U19 (2006) categories.
 
At Penn, Lange was a four-time CSA (College Squash Association) first-team All-America and a four-time first-team All-Ivy League selection. She was the Ivy League Player of the Year as a junior in 2008-09 and the Ancient Eight rookie of the Year in 2006-07. She was ranked second nationally by the CSA as a sophomore and junior and No. 3 as a senior.
 
Lange compiled a career record of 42-15, 21-5 in the Ivy League. All but three of those matches came at the No. 1 position. She was a three-time Intercollegiate Singles Championship finalist, a two-time captain for the Quakers, and led Penn to the Ivy League title and a No. 1 national ranking in 2007-08.
 
"One thing about Kristen is that she's strong and unafraid," Wyant said. "She was our Michael Jordan. She was the big dog."
 
That success in college has earned Lange a spot in the Class XIII of the Penn Athletics Hall of Fame. She is the sixth women's squash player to be inducted into the Hall of Fame and the first, male or female, who graduated after 2000.
 
"I've been thinking about that a lot," Lange said of her selection. "I was at work when I got the call from my coach at Penn, Jack Wyant, and I immediately starting jumping up and down in my office, which is not very like me.
 
"It meant a lot. I gave a lot to Penn in those four years. I was very thankful for the opportunity to attend Penn and to be able to play with the group of people that I played with. Even if I didn't receive this honor I would look back on my time at Penn very, very fondly. I feel like this is just recognition for everything I worked really hard to give Penn and to make Penn the very best it could be."
 
Lange's road to Penn wasn't straightforward. For one, she didn't know much about East Coast schools until she started playing in junior tournaments in the East when she was 14.
 
"For someone from Seattle, I would have been super happy to go to (the University of Washington) and get a good education there," Lange said.
 
All that changed, though, when she met Wyant at a junior tournament at Yale. She liked Penn, its campus and the squash courts from playing junior tournaments there, so she struck up a conversation with Wyant and liked what he had to say.
 
"I thought he would be a cool person to have as a coach," Lange said.
 
Lange had offers from a number of schools but turned most of those down. When Wyant called to see if she was interested in taking an official visit to Penn, Lange jumped at the chance. She also visited Yale and Stanford. Penn, though, was the place for her.
 
"At the end of the day I just loved Penn, where it was, the people," Lange said. "I liked the experience I had playing in junior tournaments there. I felt the team was relatable; they had a similar background as me, not coming from the East Coast, not coming from prep schools. They were coming from Canada and other places. They understood my background so I felt more comfortable going to Penn.
 
"And I really loved the campus, how close it was to Center City. For me, being in a city, being close to an airport that if anything happened to my family or I needed to go home for some reason I could just hop on a flight and get a direct flight home. That was really important to me. Once it came time to make a choice, it seemed like a pretty easy decision for me to make to go to Penn. The next thing I knew, I was there."
 
After college, Lange returned to Seattle where she embarked on a five-year professional career, reaching as high as No. 51 in the world. After retiring, Lange received her law degree from the University of Washington in 2018 and has worked in several capacities in the Seattle area.
 
She is currently an associate attorney at Ogden Murphy Wallace where she works in civil litigation. She previously worked for Fain Anderson VanDerhoef Rosendahl O'Halloran Spillane PLLC, Wolff Defense Law Firm, King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office and served as a clerk Snohomish County Superior Court judge Edirin Okoloko.
 
In her spare time, Lange likes to take motorcycle trips along the West Coast with her husband, Chad Smith. Lange also likes to play golf, run, walk, do weight training and is thinking about getting into the latest craze: pickle ball. She and her husband are also renovating a historic loft in Seattle.
 
As far as playing squash, well…that's sort of a work in progress.
 
"I keep making comebacks," Lange said. "I still played a little bit after I retired and then COVID hit and put a stop to that. I've been trying to get back and play more but every time I do I seem to get injured. I'm slowly trying to get back into it again. I'm actually waiting on an MRI to see if I tore my labrum in my hip. That's the way it is. You turn 36 and your body goes downhill a little bit.
 
"I still enjoy playing but there are times that I forget I'm no longer a professional squash player or even a college squash player playing every single day and that's my job," she continued. "Now I sit at a desk, write briefs and case memos and research papers and such and do a little more running. It's one of those things where moderation would be a big help, but as you might imagine many of us athletes are very bad at self-moderation. Once you know what your body can do, it's hard to teach your body that you're not 22 or 24 anymore."