Men’s squash finishes Potter Cup in fourth after losses to Trinity, Yale

Despite entering the tournament as the No. 2 seed, the Quakers failed to advance past the semifinals

HARTFORD, Conn. — Heading into the Potter Cup tournament, held at Trinity College last weekend, Penn was ranked No. 2 nationally and only lost once in the regular season. But by Sunday afternoon, the team had lost twice more and had finished the season in fourth place.

The tournament began well for the Quakers, with a 7-2 win over Drexel in the quarterfinals — held on Friday — in a repeat of what happened when the teams played in November.

But when the Quakers faced Trinity in the semifinals, things started to go downhill. At the end of January, Penn defeated the Bantams 7-2 at Penn Squash Center. And despite being the No. 6 seed and going 12-4 in the regular season, Trinity had ended the regular season on a three-game losing streak.

But, Trinity did have a home crowd; despite a snowstorm outside, many fans were in the Kellner Squash Center to cheer on the Bantams. And this mattered when Trinity stunned the Quakers in an emotional yet exhilarating 5-4 loss.

The contest was back and forth, with neither team ever really seeming to be fully in control until the final point was scored. In a show of how even the competition was, Penn won 17 games to Trinity’s 18.

“I thought that our boys were absolute warriors today,” coach Gilly Lane said following Saturday’s match. “We played in a hostile environment against a hungry team that ended up winning more points than we did in crucial situations.”

Saturday’s contest was back and forth throughout the afternoon. Penn won the first match, as Penn senior Dillon Huang defeated Trinity’s Marwan ElBorolossey in four games.

The next game had a much more unconventional finish. Down two games to one and trailing in the fourth game, Penn junior Dana Santry pushed his opponent into the glass, which led to his disqualification.

After four more matches, the two teams were tied at three wins apiece, with three matches left to play. And following a five-game, 68-minute thriller where Penn junior Nick Spizzirri came back from two games down to win in five sets, Penn held a 4-3 advantage and was on the cusp of another victory and a spot in the Potter Cup final.

But in a finish eerily similar to Penn’s only other defeat of the season — at Harvard on Jan. 22 — the Quakers were not able to win either of the last two matches, and ultimately lost 5-4. The final match of the day, which featured Trinity’s Joachim Chuah Han Wen against Penn sophomore Roger Baddour, was particularly heartbreaking, as Baddour was struggling through obvious pain throughout the match.

“[Roger’s] one of the most unselfish people I’ve ever met in my entire life,” Lane said on Saturday. “He’s the kid you always want to coach, he’s the kid you always want on your team, he’s the kid that you would do anything for — and he put his body, his heart, his mind on the line for the team.”

Even though they had already been knocked out of Potter Cup contention, the Quakers had one last match Sunday to try to salvage a consolation in the third-place game against Yale. But after nearly four hours of play, Penn suffered another heartbreaking 5-4 defeat.

While the final scores were the same on Saturday and Sunday, the two matches as a whole were vastly different. One key difference was that Penn made two lineup changes from Saturday’s semifinal, with Shaam Gambhir and Oliver Green in while Roger Baddour and Tushar Shahani did not play Sunday. Gambhir had seen action on Friday against Drexel, but for Green, this was his first playing time of the tournament.

But for Lane, there were still similarities, as he said that “what was similar is we didn’t close out the games well. We had opportunities.”

Once the matches began, Sunday’s game seemed eerily similar to Saturday’s. Penn jumped ahead, but Yale caught up. Just like the day prior, with three matches left, the two sides were tied at three apiece.

Once the matches began, it didn’t take long for the Quakers to jump out to an early lead, with junior Nick Spizzirri defeating Yale’s Maxwell Orr in three games in the first match of the day to finish.

But instead of Penn jumping ahead to the 4-3 lead, it was Yale. And to put the Quakers’ backs even further against the wall, Penn dropped the first two games in each of the final two matches — of which Penn needed to win both.

But it was then that the Quakers’ stars shone the brightest. Senior Saksham Choudhary won the final three games to secure a win.

“It was an unbelievable win for Saksham in his last match playing for the team [for him to] win in five,” Lane said.

And sophomore Abdelrahman Dweek clawed his way back against Yale’s Nikhil Ismail to tie his match at two games apiece. However, in the end, he couldn’t complete the comeback, as Yale won the game 11 points to seven, the match three games to two, and the day’s contest five matches to four.

“To work back from two-love down, I just think he spent a lot of energy there,” Lane said Sunday. “But I’m really proud of the fight today.”

The Quakers now finish the Potter Cup, and the season, ranked fourth in the country. Yale claims third place. Next up for Penn are the CSA Individual Championships, which will take place next weekend at the Specter Squash Center in Philadelphia.

But despite the loss closing out a disappointing Potter Cup for the team, Lane still complimented Penn’s performance Sunday, remarking that “it was a pretty disheartening loss yesterday, and the boys made a decision to really go for it today, and I couldn’t be more proud of them.”

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