As expected, the Philadelphia metropolitan area was the headlining location for the closest-contested college squash action over the weekend. The excitement carried over from the first couple weekends of the season, with several well-fought matches throughout the schedule.
- Winners of 5-4 matches, just at Penn and Princeton alone, included: the Virginia men and women gutting out matches against Cornell; Princeton men over Virginia; Amherst women upsetting a shorthanded Stanford squad and the Amherst men outlasting Dickinson; Dickinson men turning around and upsetting Bates with the Bates women returning the favor against the Dickinson women.
- The Amherst-Navy men’s match, also at Penn, ended 6-3 in favor of the Mammoths, with the contest turning on the result of the No. 3 match between Amherst’s Kedar Nagaraj and Navy’s Matthew Wang. With four of their five games going to extra points, they produced an instant classic which ultimately went Nagaraj’s way, clinching the win for Amherst.
- The No. 1 Penn men’s team and No. 3 Princeton women’s team solidified their early season standing as top teams to beat this season with perfect records over the weekend.
- Up at Hamilton College, the Tufts teams emerged victorious from the round robin with convincing wins over host Hamilton, Hobart & William Smith, and Connecticut College. All matches there held to the teams’ rankings, with Hobart & William Smith each going 2-1 and Hamilton earning two victories over Conn.
- No. 12 Western Ontario jumped across the border again this weekend, this time meeting up with Middlebury and St. Lawrence at St. Lawrence’s home venue. Western captured both victories, while Middlebury split with St. Lawrence in their own match.
- The Brown teams, in their first full season as a club team but with several holdovers from their varsity squads, commenced their season over the last week. The highlight was the “Battle of the Bears” with their trip to Bowdoin, where the Brown bears outlasted the Polar Bears in two tight matches (5-4 men; 7-2 women).
- In other varsity action over the weekend for the women, Wesleyan earned their first win of the season over Mount Holyoke, who in turn got their own first win a day later over Bard. Vassar also took out Bard in a local Liberty League contest. Haverford also hosted St. Lawrence on Friday evening with SLU capturing a comfortable win.
- The other men’s varsity matches featured No. 4 Trinity kicking off their season with a win over MIT, Columbia beating F&M on the road, Haverford losing at home to St. Lawrence, and Fordham taking out two top club teams in Cal-Berkeley and Washington University in St. Louis.
- Club team shout outs go to the men’s and women’s teams from Washington University in St. Louis, which ventured to New York and earned some quality wins.
The next iteration of the college squash rankings will be released on Wednesday, Dec. 1.
