The 2022 College Squash Association (CSA) National Collegiate Individual Championships will begin on Friday morning at 9:00 a.m. at the Arlen Specter US Squash Center on the campus of Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA.
All draws, live results, and live streaming links to all of the active courts at the Specter Center can be found at the Tournament Homepage. The stream on the East Court, one of the two all-glass show courts in the new facility, will also have live commentary throughout the competition.
The Championships are comprised of ten 16-player draws (80 women and 80 men) which will take place over the course of three days starting Friday. The top draws – Ramsay Division for the women and Pool Division for the men – will feature 16 players each vying for the individual national championship of college squash and All-America honors. The winners of the four Holleran and Molloy (B) Divisions for each gender will be recognized as Second Team All-America selections, along with the bottom six finishers from the Ramsay and Pool draws.
Cornell senior sensation Sivasangari Subramaniam earned the top seed in the Ramsay Cup draw thanks to a stellar undefeated season, which included a head-to-head win over second seed, Hana Moataz, of Harvard. If these two meet in the final, as they are seeded to do, it would be a rematch of the 2020 Ramsay Cup semifinal, which Moataz won in three extremely close games. Both top players will meet Ramsay Cup debutants in the first round – 16-seed Andrea Lee from Colby and 15-seed Nouran Youssef from Trinity.
Rounding out the top four seeds are third-seeded Malak Ashraf Kamal, also from Trinity, and Moataz’s Harvard teammate, Marina Stefanoni. Both players had excellent records during the season with the only blemishes coming against other top-ranked players, but this will be their first time competing for a collegiate national championship. Kamal draws Connecticut neighbor Elisabeth Ross from Yale, while Stefanoni meets another Ivy League foe in the first round, Elle Ruggiero from Princeton.
The 7-versus-10 matchup between Cornell’s Wen Li Lai and Trinity’s Jana Safy brings some additional intrigue to the first round. The two met in a five-game battle during the regular season with Wen Li earning the victory. 8-seed Alina Bushma from Drexel will be playing with her heart on her sleeve this weekend as she thinks about her family and friends back home in her native Ukraine.
In one of the deepest and most talented draws in recent memory, Princeton’s Youssef Ibrahim grabs the top seed in the men’s national championship bracket, the Pool Trophy. Ibrahim, fresh off a sublime cinderella run to the final of the Platinum Windy City Open in Chicago this week, will need to regroup and re-energize if he is to fulfill his Number 1 seed on Sunday. Ibrahim draws Yale’s Nadav Raziel in the first round.
2019 Pool Trophy Champion Victor Crouin from Harvard earns the 2-seed this weekend, looking to ride off into graduation with a second title under his belt. Crouin is seeded to meet a familiar face in the semifinal, third seeded Andrew Douglas from Penn, who is also in his last season. Douglas had match balls against Crouin in the Potter Cup National Championship match two weeks ago and will be out to flip the final result to earn a place in Sunday’s final.
Virginia’s Aly Hussein has by far the toughest draw of the top four seeds when he takes on 13-seed Matias Knudsen of Drexel. Playing essentially on his home campus and in a facility he knows well, Knudsen will put Hussein’s skill, athleticism, and endurance to the test.
The Pool Trophy finalists from two years ago – Harvard’s champion Marwan Tarek and Penn’s runner-up Aly Abou El Einen – return to the competition as the 5- and 6-seeds with their sights set high as well. It will be a gauntlet for either of them to return to the final, especially for Abou El Einen against undefeated 12-seed Sam Scherl of Harvard in the first round, but do not be surprised if either of them find their way back to the Pool Final.
Holleran Divisions
The National Champion Harvard Women sent three people to the Ramsay Cup draw, but also captured two of the top seeds in the Holleran (B) Divisions. The Crimson’s Habeeba Eldefrawy and Serena Daniel join Si Ma from Stanford and Ashley Manning from Penn as the four Number 1 seeds across the divisions.
Molloy Divisions
University of Rochester’s talented top of their lineup just missed out on Pool Trophy spots, but they grabbed two of the top four seeds in the Molloy (B) Divisions on the men’s side. Callan Hall from Columbia and rookie Abdelrahman Nassar of Trinity are the other two top seeds in four very deep divisions.
