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Princeton University Athletics
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Squash Individual Championships Begin With 14 Princeton Players Hunting For National Title
February 29, 2008 | Men's Squash
One week after the Princeton women upset top-seeded Penn for the national squash team championship, the best men's and women's players have descended on Annapolis, Md., for the final weekend of the collegiate season. The national individual championships will take place this weekend, and Princeton has seven men and seven women vying for the biggest individual prize in the sport.
The 2008 CSA championships, which are being held in the Halsey Field House International Squash Courts Complex at the Naval Academy, begin Friday morning and will go until Sunday afternoon, when the men's and women's championships will be held on the glass court at 1 and 2 p.m., respectively. The top 32 men's and women's players will compete for national titles, while players outside the top 32 will have a chance to play in either the men's Malloy Cup or the women's Holleran Cup.
POTTER CUP - MEN
If you followed the men's team national championship two weeks ago, you will feel very familiar with the first round of the Potter Cup draw. Of the 16 first-round matches, only one features two players who did not play in that national final. Ten-time national champion Trinity sends eight players into the main draw, while three-time Ivy champion and national runner-up Princeton sends seven, and the tournament organizers were able to keep both teams from facing each other in the first round.
The top seed in the men's draw is Trinity sophomore Baset Chaudhry, the unbeaten No. 1 player for the Bantams. Chaudhry has lost one match in college, a 2007 3-0 semifinal defeat to eventual champion Siddharth Suchde of Harvard. Chaudhry has been unstoppable this season and is the strong favorite to advance to the finals. His first Princeton opponent could be 16th-seeded sophomore David Canner, who takes on 17th-seeded William Newnham of Rochester in the first round. The winner is likely to face Chaudhry Friday night at 8 p.m.
Other Princetonians in the top half of the draw are senior Tom McKay, junior Kimlee Wong and sophomore Santiago Imberton. The highest-seeded of the trio is Wong, who earned the fifth seed after a dominant season as Princeton's No. 2 player. If form holds, Wong would meet Harvard No. 1 Colin West in potentially the most exciting quarterfinal matchup of the tournament. McKay and Imberton are both the lower-seeded players in the first-round matchups against Rochester's Jim Bristow and Cornell's Christopher Sachvie, respectively.
The two dominant names in the bottom half of the draw are Princeton No. 1 Mauricio Sanchez and Trinity No. 2 Gustav Detter. Sanchez is a 2007 national finalist and two-time semifinalist, and he has not dropped a game this season to anybody other than Chaudhry. Detter has been brilliant at No. 2 for Trinity and has swept through his entire season. If either of them are knocked off before their potentially thrilling 5:40 Saturday semifinal, it would be considered a major upset.
Princeton freshman David Letourneau and Hesham El Halaby are both in the bottom half of the draw as well. Letourneau is the 10th seed and could face seventh-seeded Hameed Ahmed of Rochester in the second round. El Halaby takes on talented Penn player Lee Rosen, with the winner likely to face Detter in the second round.
RAMSAY CUP - WOMEN
Seven members of Princeton's national championship squad will compete for the Ramsay Cup, named after their own head coach Gail Ramsay, who is the only player in women's collegiate squash history to win four national championships. Ramsay's squad will be led by sophomores Amanda Siebert and Neha Kumar, both of whom would have to knock off at least one higher-seeded player to make the final.
The top-seeded women's player is Yale's Miranda Ranieri, who takes on Princeton senior Carly Grabowski in the first round. The winner of that match could take on Tiger sophomore Emery Maine, the lacrosse player turned squash walk-on who clinched Princeton's 2008 national title with a 3-1 win at the No. 4 spot last weekend.
Kumar is the other Princeton player in the top half of the draw, and she opens with Harvard No. 3 Katherine O'Donnell in the first round. If Kumar holds form, her first match against a higher seed would be a quarterfinal showdown with Ranieri. Trinity's Lauren Polonich and Ashley Clackson are also players to watch in the top of the draw.
Siebert, the 2007 Constable Invitational champion, is the third seed and will open against Harvard's Bethan Williams. Siebert rose to No. 1 in the Princeton lineup and has wins over Clackson and 2006 national champion Lily Lorentzen this season. If form holds, she would get a third shot against 2007 finalist and Penn No. 1 Kristen Lange in the semifinals; Lange is 2-0 against Siebert this season, including a 3-0 win in the national team final. Two of Siebert's teammates will battle hard to stop that matchup, including sophomore Kaitlin Sennatt, who will take on Lange in the opener. Freshman Jackie Moss could be a second-round opponent if she can upend Dartmouth's Ashley Malenchak.
One of the most intriguing first-round matches will take place at 11:40, when Princeton senior tri-captain Casey Riley takes on Penn sophomore Sydney Scott. Riley, who has played at the top of the lineup prior to injuries, played arguably the best squash of her career as she helped Princeton to a national title last weekend. Scott, a former Penn No. 1, was also at the top of her game last weekend, which included a 3-1 win over Clackson and a 3-0 win over Moss.
GoPrincetonTigers.com will have full recaps of each day when results become available.