Women's Squash Earns No. 1 Seed in CSA Howe Cup Tournament

The quest for the Howe Cup will begin Friday, March 6 for the No. 1-ranked Princeton women's squash team, which will hold the No. 1 seed and await the winner of the March 5 match between eighth-seeded Yale and ninth-seeded Drexel at the Arlen Specter US Squash Center in Philadelphia.

Draws are available here.

The Tigers are aiming for a nearly unprecedented season in program history. Already having captured the CSA Ramsay Cup individual national championship in January thanks to the successful run from junior Zeina Zein, Princeton won the Ivy League title on Feb. 15 for the first time since 2013, and a week later, Princeton won the inaugural Ivy League Tournament. If the team can follow it up with the Howe Cup title, it would mark the first time since 1989, and just the second in program history, that Princeton would have had the individual national champion, the Ivy League title, and the Howe Cup title in the same season.

All matches will start at 3 p.m. on their respective days. The quarterfinal matchup against either Yale or Drexel will be on Friday, March 6. A win there would send Princeton into a semifinal against one of fourth-seeded Harvard, fifth-seeded Trinity or 12th-seeded Tufts on Saturday, March 7, and the final on Sunday, March 8 would be against the team that comes out of the lower half of the bracket, which includes second-seeded Penn, third-seeded Stanford, sixth-seeded Virginia, seventh-seeded Cornell, 10th-seeded Amherst and 11th-seeded Dartmouth.

This season, Princeton faced each of the other top 11 seeds in dual matches, defeating all except Stanford, including Cornell and Penn twice each. The Stanford match was Princeton's last defeat, 6-3 back on Nov. 23, and since then, no match has been closer than 6-3. Against the team's potential quarterfinal opponents, Princeton turned in a 9-0 win over Drexel on Nov. 22 in the season opener in Philadelphia and an 8-1 win over Yale in New Haven on Jan. 17.

Princeton's last Howe Cup title was in 2009, which was the program's 17th.

At 13-1 and on a 12-match win streak, Princeton is on its longest winning streak since a 12-match run at the start of the 2012-13 season. Another win would give the team its longest win streak since going 13-0 in 2008-09, which was part of a 16-match winning streak going back to the 2007-08 season.

The Howe Cup is named in part for Betty Howe Constable, along with her sister Peggy and mother Margaret. Betty Constable was Princeton's first varsity coach, from 1971-91, leading the team to two Ivy League titles and the program's first 12 national titles, with current coach Gail Ramsay leading the team to, now, five Ivy titles and the last five national titles.

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