Northwestern player Akhil Daswani reports on his team’s matches in the Northwestern Round Robin, which was held on November 14th.
Evanston, IL – In our first home round robin of the year, #26 Northwestern University hosted local Midwest rivals #50 University of Illinois and #51 Notre Dame University.
Our first match was scheduled for an early 9 am start against Notre Dame. Notre Dame put up a good fight but we were able to win positions 1 through 8 relatively comfortably. The best match of the day came at number 9 where Kenny Schlax of Notre Dame was locked in a heated battle with our new rookie player, Laura Heeley. She put up a great fight but eventually succumbed in 3 tightly contested games, giving us a final overall score of 8-1.
Our second match of the weekend was against the immensely improved Illinois team. The first round of matches saw our number 6, Andrew Liu, and our number 9, Diana Sands, pull out quick 3 game wins. Eugene Kim, at number 3, was pushed to a fourth game by Vedant Bubna but was able to close his match out convincingly. Peter Roh, Vivan Som, and I then posted wins at the 5, 8, and 2 positions to put the match out of reach for Illinois.
The final round of matches contained all the drama. Will Benedict and Jacob Yeo were locked in a fierce battle at number 4. They were closely matched splitting the first four games, but Benedict was able to pull out the win in the 5th game. At number 7, Chan Park and J.J Lee were also locked in a dead even battle with Lee fighting from 2-1 down to even the match. However, Park maintained his composure in the 5th and came through with the win. Jay Dalal made quick work of his opponent at number 1 to give Northwestern a 9-0 overall win. The match was a lot closer than the final match score indicates.
In the only other match of the weekend, Illinois beat Notre Dame handily by a 9-0 score. With the exciting weekend of squash coming to an end we now turn our focus to MIT, Northeastern, and Conn who we will play this coming weekend in Boston.
