Hamilton College’s women’s squash program and Head Coach Jamie King have earned the 2022 Chaffee Award, awarded to the women’s team that exhibited the highest level of sporting behavior throughout the season. The award recipient was announced on Saturday, March 5 prior to the Ramsay Cup semifinal at the 2022 CSA National Collegiate Individual Championships in Philadelphia.
This is the second time that Hamilton has received the Chaffee Award, with the team also earning the award in 2011 under King’s leadership. The Continentals finished a successful season this year by ending the season ranked 20th in the country.
“Hamilton College Women’s Squash Team is pleased to have won the Chaffee Sportsmanship Award,” said King. “It is a very prestigious award and coveted by the team more than any other. Having known Clarence Chaffee when he was alive, and having gone to Williams and listened to my coach Sean Sloane talk about Chaffee and his teams’ acts of sportsmanship and fair play, this award is extremely meaningful to me personally.”
“One can not always control the outcome of a squash match. There are too many variables out of our hands. ‘Chafe’ and Sean Sloane would say that you can control your effort and how you behave, showing respect to your opponents, officials, parents, spectators, and ultimately the game of squash itself. The Hamilton College Women’s Squash Team is honored to have been selected for the 2022 Clarence Chaffee Team Sportsmanship Award and will try to live up to the ideals that ‘Chafe’ and his teams demonstrated every day.”
The Chaffee Award is given annually to a women’s team coach whose team has demonstrated the qualities of sportsmanship, teamwork, character, and improvement. Coaches discussed with their team which team they felt is deserving of this award based on those qualities. Coaches then submitted their nominations and voting took place online leading up to the Championships.
In 1987, the women’s squash team at Williams College donated the award in honor of the college’s 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.”
Bowdoin College, Dickinson College, and Amherst College were the other leading vote-getters for the 2022 Chaffee Award.
