Letter to the Editor

Author: [no author name found]

To the Editor:

We are writing on behalf of the Middlebury women's squash team. Our team competed in Nationals at Harvard on Feb. 13-15, topping off one of our most successful seasons in over a decade. We were disappointed that the sum of our achievements this year did not receive more than a passing mention in a recent edition of The Middlebury Campus.

Here's what The Campus missed in its reporting: The women's squash team finished #13 in the nation, which includes all Division I and III schools. Over the weekend of February 13-15, we faced #12 Bowdoin, losing 6-3; and then proceeded to beat #16 GWU 8-1 and #14 Bates 6-3, in the finals of the consolation. Nationals is organized according to divisions. The A Division includes the #1-8 teams in the nation (Princeton, Penn, Trinity, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Stanford, and Williams); the B Division includes the #9-16 teams (Brown, Dartmouth, Mt. Holyoke, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Bates, Hamilton, GWU); and so on. What many people may not realize is that all of these divisions are connected and any team is capable of being a part of any division. There are a total of 37 teams in the nation-and we went from being #18 last year to #13. That jump in the rankings is a newsworthy achievement.

Not only did we vastly improve our national standing this year, but we also set a new record for the number of wins in one season in the history of Middlebury Women's Squash. We expected that these achievements might have received more than a perfunctory blurb in The Campus. Instead of a profile of our successful season, the Campus chose to publish a feature on "The art of the zamboni master," while our accomplishments were reduced to a sports briefs item.

This is not the first time The Campus has overlooked the squash program. The paper did not send photographers to our home matches against Hamilton, Williams, and Dartmouth. Given that Middlebury rarely hosts Ivy League schools for athletic events, we were surprised at this glaring editorial oversight.

While we recognize that Middlebury's athletics program is not limited to the men's and women's squash teams, and that the school is host to a diverse array of athletes, we hope the squash program will receive more equitable coverage from The Middlebury Campus going forward.

Respectfully,

Tri-captains Sally Hatfield '09, Caroline Woodworth '09 and Brooke Farquhar '08.5