The men’s squash team ended J-term with a couple of eventful weeks. It first concluded the regular season schedule by defeating then 14th-ranked Navy 5-4 on Friday, Jan. 29 at the Yale round robin in New Haven, Conn. and moving past the Midshipmen in the national rankings. The following weekend, Feb. 5-6, the Panthers traveled to Hartford to compete for the NESCAC Championship. The team entered NESCACs as the tour- nament’s second seed – the highest the men’s squad has ever been seeded.
Bates knocked off the Panthers 6-3 in the semifinals, but Middlebury made the most of the weekend on Sunday as the team garnered its second win over Williams this season with a 5-4 win in the third place match. The third place finish is the team’s best in the conference tournament since finishing third in the 2010-11 season.
After a whirlwind J-term schedule, the team has two weeks off before nationals, which will be held at Yale on Feb. 25-27. “I think that these two weeks will work to our advantage — we were all pretty beat up after NESCACs and needed some rest,” Wyatt French ’17 said. “However, we need to be really focused and smart about how we practice during these two weeks to make sure that we are sharp for nationals.”
The only downside to the time off is that the Panthers have been on a tear recently. French has been at the center of this tear, winning each of the last five matches he has played for the Panthers in the third spot of the lineup.
After French managed to get through NESCACs without dropping a single set, he said that “it feels good to be playing well near the end of the year. I was a lot more confident in my drop shot, trickle boast and attacking boast so I was able to attack all four corners of the court well.”
“The third place finish is disappoint- ing because we beat Bates earlier in the season, but they are a really good team and we knew that it was going to be hard to beat them again,” French said. “It was satisfying to beat Williams in the third place playoff. This is the first year that we have beaten Williams and it feels great to beat them twice in one season.”
The only “disappointment” for the Panthers heading into nationals was that they finished third at NESCACs. However, beating a team of Bates’ caliber twice in the same season is a tall order. Bates’ top player is Ahmed Abdel Khalek from Cairo – a three time all-American, three time NESCAC Player of the Year and the men’s defending national champion who appeared in the “Faces in the Crowd” feature in the Apr. 6 edition of Sports Illustrated after his undefeated campaign last season.
Looking forward, the Panthers are currently ranked 15th nationally in the most recent College Squash Association, dropping one spot down after Navy’s win over Franklin and Marshall and Middlebury’s loss to Bates. The Panthers’ rank of 14th heading into NESCACs was its highest since the 2010-11 season which was the last time the team qualified for the B division at nationals. With 16th- ranked Brown as the only challenger behind Middlebury for its 15th ranking, and with the team’s 5-4 head-to-head win over the Bears earlier this season, the Panthers look to be a lock for the 15th ranking at nationals.
For seniors like Cromwell, French and Harrison Croll ‘16 who have won the C bracket at the end of each of their three seasons with the team, a chance to break into the second bracket (played by the teams that finish the regular season ranked nine through sixteen) would be rewarding.
“It is hard to know, but whomever we play in the first round will be beatable and it is up to us to prepare well for that match,” French said.
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