by Rob Dinerman, College Squash Historian
It would be extremely challenging to imagine a top-tier PSA squash player who has maintained a stronger continuing connection to his college-years’ squash experience than has been the case with Ali Farag, Harvard Class of 2014, who has been the best squash player in the world over the past half-decade. The four World Open titles (in 2019 and from 2021-23), three U.S. Open championships (in 2017, 2019 and 2024) and three Tournament of Champions crowns (in 2019, 2022 and 2024) that he has won during that time frame are all tops on the Tour with room to spare, as are the 11 major championships he has captured when one includes his run to the winner’s circle in the 2023 British Open, whose final round he attained the four other times that the event has been held from 2019-24.
Although Farag had reached the finals of the 2010 World Junior Open, won the 2011 British Junior Open and led Egypt to victory in the 2010 biennial World Junior Team Championships, he had no wish to go to college in the U.S., opting instead to spend his 2010-11 freshman year contentedly studying at the American University in Cairo. But the Egyptian Revolution, which occurred less than a month after his triumph in England, changed his thinking and he applied and was accepted at Harvard that spring. On the very first weekend of his college career in January 2012, taken aback by the previously-unknown pressure of playing in a team situation, Farag fell behind Princeton star (and the reigning College Individuals champion) Todd Harrity two games to one in a match that Harvard had to have to avoid a team loss. He managed to get through the fourth and fifth games in what he later confessed to Crimson Coach Mike Way had been, to quote Way, “the toughest match of his life. Not just the physical but also the mental part of the fight and the noise of the gallery. I think this weekend he felt the weight and felt that he was carrying the team. So he put a lot of pressure on himself, and when you do that you fatigue prematurely. For Ali, it was like, ‘Welcome to college squash.’ ”
Farag, whom one teammate (accurately) described as “on a different level than anyone else,” went undefeated for the remainder of that season, blazing through the draw of the Individuals tournament without losing a single game, including in the finals against Columbia freshman star Ramit Tandon, a semis winner over Harrity. That spring Farag was named Harvard’s “Male Athlete of the Year” by the school newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, for 2011-12. His undefeated status extended through the 2012-13 dual-meet season, but he suffered postseason losses to both Harrity in the team play-offs and his Egyptian compatriot and contemporary Amr Khalifa in the semifinals of the Individuals. Although those setbacks were extremely painful at the time — all the more so since Harrity had defeated Farag’s older brother Wael a few years earlier in the World Junior Open and Khalifa had been a rival and nemesis throughout their junior careers — both Ali Farag and Coach Way fully believe in retrospect that they were the best thing that could have happened, since they knocked some overconfidence out of him and made him more receptive to coaching and constructive criticism than he had previously been. Both Farag and his teammates — especially his fellow starting-lineup seniors Brandon McLaughlin, Gary Power, Tommy Mullaney and Nigel Koh — completely dominated the 2013-14 season that followed, culminating in a 9-0 thrashing of perennial champion Trinity College in the final round of the national team championship and Farag’s run to the Individuals winner’s circle with a decisive final-round win over Khalifa.
Farag was selected as that year’s recipient of the Skillman Award, the highest individual honor in men’s college squash, “given annually to a senior men’s squash player who has demonstrated outstanding sportsmanship during his entire college career while maintaining a high level of play.” Nobody embodies both criteria for this award more completely than Farag, about whom Mullaney — when asked years later to characterize Farag’s impact on the Harvard program and college squash as a whole — responded, “Ali was the guy who, for all his success and accolades, simultaneously had the grace and humility to go out of his way to sit with visiting friends and family to explain the game so that they felt welcome at matches. I couldn’t imagine a better ambassador for the sport.”
During the graduation ceremony a few months later, Farag received the William J. Bingham Award, “given annually to that male member of the graduating class of Harvard College who, through integrity, courage, leadership and ability on the athletic fields, has best served the high purpose of Harvard as exemplified by the late William J. Bingham ’16, former Director of Athletics. The award goes to our most outstanding male athlete.” Farag was only the third squash player in the award’s 60-year history (also Anil Nayar in ’69 and Adrian Ezra in ’94) to be honored with this distinction. “His legacy is going to go down in history,” Coach Way said upon learning of this honor. “He’s played a brand of squash here that no one has ever seen in our sport. He’s definitely going to live on for the guys who have played alongside him, and also for us as the coaches. As long as we’re in the driver’s seat, we will refer to Ali and how no one respects the game as much as he does—respecting referees, opponents, coaches—that’s part of his legacy.”
Despite Farag’s extraordinary success in junior squash and as a collegian (capping off his intercollegiate career by winning his second Individuals), he had not planned to continue and compete on the PSA tour. A serious student, he had earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering and was going to return to Egypt and embark on a career in that field. But Coach Way and Farag’s then-girlfriend Nour El Tayeb (whom he married in 2016), herself a top-tier player on the PSA women’s tour, encouraged him to give the pro circuit a shot — and the rest is history. Within five years he had become the best squash player in the world, ascending to the No. 1 ranking on the PSA tour with a winter/spring of 2019 surge during which he won the Tournament of Champions at Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan in January, captured the World Open in Egypt in March and advanced to the finals of the British Open in London in May — and, as noted, he has maintained that level throughout the years that have followed.
Throughout Farag’s unstoppable cascade of accomplishments — which have now reached the point where he fully belongs in the greatest-of-all-time discussion, with plenty of time still to add to his already extraordinary “numbers” — he has continued to rely on Coach Way’s advice and counsel. Coach Way, with characteristic modesty, characterizes his role as more that of a “sounding board” who doesn’t do much more than “wait in the wings,” rather than being an active participant in the process. However, the truth is that he and Farag frequently communicate by text, email and phone, and Way makes an effort to watch Farag’s matches, either in person whenever Farag is playing on the northeastern corridor, or on PSA TV when Farag is playing in a tournament overseas. Coach Way then shares what he observed and constructively criticizes Farag’s performance — very much like what happened while Farag was compiling his 52-2 record during his three years as a Harvard student.
Indeed, when Farag won the 2017 U.S. Open — as did El Tayeb, marking the only time that a husband/wife pairing has ever won a major pro squash tournament at the same time — he was coached by Way throughout his final-round win over Mohamed El Shorbagy, even though the tournament was in Philadelphia and Coach Way was in Cambridge watching the final (along with the rest of Harvard’s men’s and women’s teams) on PSA TV! After every game, while Farag was toweling off and getting a drink of water, he would check his iPhone and read the advice Coach Way had texted him, and in his speech during the trophy presentation Farag gave a shout-out to the Harvard team and the overall Harvard community for conveying their support throughout his run to that championship.
When asked a few years ago to describe Way’s current level of involvement in his career, Farag responded that Way “still is my mentor, and he always will be. We discuss big matches, always. He watches them online, then sends me a lengthy email with his take on the match, then we have a phone call to further discuss it. More importantly, whenever I feel unmotivated, nervous, lost, overexcited, or that any unfavorable sentiment is getting the better of me, he’s my go-to person!” Farag still wears a Harvard crest on his shirt, still has “Harvard College ‘14” embedded in his email signature-line and still makes it a priority to hit with the current Harvard team members whenever he is in the area. In Way’s characterization, “Ali still bleeds Harvard crimson and always will.”
For decades it had been a universally accepted truism that any player who chose to go to university was thereby giving up on a chance to be a successful PSA pro, since it was felt that the player would be sacrificing too many years on the circuit to realistically make up for that lost time once he/she graduates. Farag’s achievements during the decade-plus that has now passed since his Harvard graduation — along with those of Amanda Sobhy, Olivia Weaver (both recently ranked in the top-four of the women’s PSA tour) and the rest of the THIRTY-ONE current or former college varsity players who represented their respective countries in Hong Kong in the 2024 World Team Championships — have emphatically and permanently proven that belief to be completely lacking in merit.
It seems poetically fitting that the men’s event in Hong Kong ended with Farag winning the clinching match over El Shorbagy in Egypt’s final-round triumph against England, which marked the fourth time (previously in 2017, 2019 and 2023) that Egypt has won this event with Farag as a team member. Immediately after winning the final point (on a forehand cross-drop finishing off a frantic front-court exchange), Farag embraced his longtime rival and then scaled the back wall, alighting outside the court to celebrate with his teammates. It was a symbolic top-of-the-world moment for a player who was a classic student-athlete at one of the best colleges in the land and has taken the lessons he learned while in college, both on and off the court, to rise to the top of his profession.
_________________________________________________________________________
Rob Dinerman has written 18 books about squash, five of which are Histories of the sport at various top-tier colleges. All of those books are arrayed on the home page of the robdinerman.com site, including his most recent college-squash book A Century Of Champions: 100 Years Of College Squash, 1923-2013, which was released in March 2024.
