HomeArticlesStanford Wins Chaffee Award for Team Sportsmanship

Stanford Wins Chaffee Award for Team Sportsmanship

The CSA awarded the 2019 Chaffee Award for Team Sportsmanship to Stanford University and Coach Mark Talbott (photo credit: Michael T. Bello)

Stanford University Women’s Squash and Head Coach Mark Talbott earned the 2019 Chaffee Award for team sportsmanship, it was announced on Sunday during the final day of the Women’s Team National Championships.  Stanford also won the award in 2013.

“It is so nice to have your peers vote for you for this award,” Talbott said after the presentation. “The women and I are really pleased and proud to be honored in this way.”

Stanford finished the 2018-2019 season ranked third in the country, their highest end-of-season ranking in program history. Entering the National Championship as the 4-seed, the Cardinal held off No. 5 Yale in the first round before falling to eventual champions Harvard in the semifinal. On Sunday, Stanford upset No. 2 Princeton in the 3/4 match-up in a banner victory for the program.

The Chaffee Award is given annually to a women’s team coach whose team has demonstrated the qualities of sportsmanship, teamwork, character, and improvement. In 1987, the women’s squash team at Williams College donated the award in honor of their former coach, Clarence C. Chaffee. Chaffee began Williams’s squash program in 1938, coached the school’s first intercollegiate team in 1939, and led the program until his retirement in 1970.

In the words of Jack Barnaby, the legendary coach of Harvard University and longtime friend and colleague of Chaffee: “If ever I had a favorite amongst my rival coaches it had to be ‘Chafe’… His love of competition, his unfailing sense of fair play, and the values he and his wife exemplified to all his players made him such a beloved coach that his fame went far and wide and still flourishes today. I know I speak for all the coaches of his era when I pay him tribute: We loved him, too.”

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