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Princeton University Athletics
Players Mentioned
Top-Ranked Trinity Brings 198-Match Win Streak To Jadwin Squash Courts Saturday
February 11, 2009 | Men's Squash
With its fourth straight Ivy League championship clinched, the No. 2 Princeton men's squash team can turn its full attention to a familiar foe. No. 1 Trinity, winners of 10 straight national championships and 198 straight matches, will head south to the Jadwin Squash Courts to take on the Tigers in the 2009 regular season finale.
The only real implication for Saturday's match is clinching the top seed for the upcoming CSA national team championships, held Feb. 20-22 in Princeton, but the importance of the match goes far beyond it. For Trinity, it keeps the Bantams' historic win streak, which dates back to Feb. 22, 1998, alive and makes it the clear favorite for an 11th straight national championship. For Princeton, which has lost three straight national championship finals to Trinity, a win or even a close loss would provide a major confidence boost heading into nationals.
The showdown will take place at 2 p.m. at the Jadwin Squash Courts, and will take place over three sessions. The first session will include matches 3, 6 and 9, followed by 2, 5 and 8 and then 1, 4 and 7. The first team to win five matches will be the winner and the top seed for the team nationals.
Princeton is 10-0 on the season and has dropped only two individual matches all year, both at the bottom of the lineup against No. 3 Yale. The Tigers are led by two-time Ivy League Player of the Year Mauricio Sanchez, who should claim the honor a third time after sweeping through the league this season. Sanchez is coming off his most dominant performance of the season, a 9-1, 9-2, 9-1 win over the fourth-ranked Colin West of Harvard. West had recently defeated Trinity's Gustav Detter, a 2008 national finalist and one of the Bantams' most successful players in recent history.
If Trinity's lineup remains the same, Sanchez and Detter would face off for the first time since the 2008 national semifinals, when Detter held off a cramping Sanchez for a 9-5, 3-9, 10-9, 9-8 victory. Should Trinity hold a challenge match this week, Sanchez could see reigning national champion Baset Chaudhry, who is unbeaten against Sanchez in four college matches.
While one will face Sanchez, the other will likely face Princeton senior Kimlee Wong, who is undefeated on the season and who also made the national semifinals last year. Wong was 0-2 against Detter last season and lost to Chaudhry in the national semifinal, but he does own a 2006 victory over Detter.
The rest of the match-ups will likely be new ones, including a showdown at No. 3 between Trinity veteran Manek Mathur and Princeton freshman Christopher Callis, who is undefeated this season and has played as high as No. 2 for the Tigers. The Tigers are hoping to have its full lineup for the first time since the earliest matches of the season; neither freshman Kelly Shannon nor junior Santiago Imberton were available when Princeton swept Harvard 9-0 to clinch the Ivy League championship.