Men’s squash defeats Bates to capture 14th place nationally

The Middlebury men’s squash team ended their fourth season on a high note, finishing the year with a record of 14 wins and 11 losses. They played at Harvard this weekend in Team Nationals and finished 14th nationally. The national ranking is incredibly impressive as it takes teams of all divisions into account.
The Panthers were able to achieve their season goal of reaching the B Division at Nationals.
“We finished a solid season, in which our number one goal was to reach the B-Flight at nationals,” DiSesa said. “By fighting hard in each of our matches at nationals. There were some truly heroic performances.”
The crowning achievement of the weekend though, was winning the National Team Sportsmanship Award for the second time in three years. Sixty-six teams nationally are considered. The Panthers were able to win the Sloane Award (Team Sportsmanship Award) for the first time in 2009. The award has been given annually since 1981. It has recently been renamed for Sean Sloane, a coach at Williams and Haverford whose teams were well known for their sportsmanship and spirit and honors the team that shows excellence in these two areas.
Middlebury played against Bates, St. Lawrence University, and Williams in the Hoehn Cup for the B Division title, with a ladder of Valentin Quan ’12, Jay Dolan ’13, Parker Hurst ’14, Brian Cady ’11, Spencer Hurst ’13, Will Moore ’14, Cooper Redpath ’13, DiSesa and Chris Ivsin ’14, respectively. Will Piekos ’11 played two exhibition matches against Bates and St. Lawrence University. The Middlebury men played Williams College in their first match, and were defeated, 8 - 1 with a win by DiSesa. The men came back strong in their second match though, to take down Bates in a hard earned 5-4 win. Quan, Dolan, both Hursts and Redpath  won their respective matches. They lost to St. Lawrence in their third match, 5-4, with Quan, Parker Hurst, Cady and DiSesa winning their respective matches.
The victory over Bates this weekend was particularly meaningful in that it was the third time Middlebury has defeated Bates this season.
DiSesa said of the win, “That is once more than we had ever beaten them at the season’s outset. That feels good.”
Bates, which has a team of mostly seniors this year, gave Middlebury a chance to prove themselves as a relatively young team, made up of mostly freshmen and sophomores in this matchup. First-year Redpath was instrumental in the win against Bates, coming back strong when the match was tied up. According to coach John Illig, “[Cooper] lost his first two games and then came back to win the next three for for a 3-2 individual victory to give us the 5-4 team win. It was a mature, gutsy performance.”