Squash takes Seven Sisters championship for fourth year

Danny Fahey Guest Writer

Even as students return to Vassar’s thawing campus and a new year floods the hearts of people seeking to change their lives, nowhere is the sense of rebirth stronger than on the squash courts of Kenyon Hall.

After experiencing a low in the first half of their season with four straight losses, the Vassar women’s squash team won their fourth Seven Sisters Championship on the weekend of Jan. 21-22. The Brewers dominated their opponents, winning over Mount Holyoke (7-2), Haverford (8-1), Wellesley (9-0), and Smith (8-1).

To go along with their championship trophy, members of the team also took home personal hardware with six of the nine spots on the All-Tournament Team going to Vassar players. Katie Siegel ’06, Nadia Jihad ’08, Judy Jarvis ’07, Teddy Weiss ’09, Blair Komar ’07, and Amalia Sax-Bolder ’08 were all honored.

Siegel, who is second on the Vassar roster and co-captain of this year’s squad along with first-ranked Anna-Sieglinde Moser ’06, has been on all four of the Seven Sister championship teams and has seen the rise of women’s squash at Vassar.

“Deciding to play squash at Vassar has probably been one of my best moves in my four years here,” said Siegel. “Each year we have had amazingly dedicated, hard-working, and fun athletes playing for both the men's and women's teams.”

Over the past five years, the team has moved up national Division III rankings from twenty-sixth to top out at fifteenth before ending the 2004-2005 season as the eighteenth-ranked DIII team in the nation.

“These results are a measure of our progress as a team and have enhanced the College’s reputation in the squash world,” said men’s and women’s squash Coach Jane Parker.

Although the team has enjoyed recent success, women’s squash started the 2005-2006 season slowly. Last May, the team graduated players in the first, second, third, fifth, sixth, and eighth positions, leaving many holes in this year’s squad.

“We started the 2005-2006 season with three experienced players on the team,” said Parker. “We filled the remaining positions with players recruited on campus, none of whom had any previous squash experience.”

The result was an 0-4 start to the season, and a 1-4 record heading into winter break. The team dropped to twenty-second in the national rankings, but a new year brought some additions to the roster and a chance to turn their season around.

The team was invigorated after break when several players joined late in the season. Komar returned from studying abroad; Jarvis and Iyer had taken time off, and Jihad was a transfer student from Connecticut College. With their lineup thus recharged after winter break, Vassar women’s squash was ready to attack the main part of their schedule in 2006.

“Following 18 months of limited access to the squash courts due to the Kenyon construction project, we were excited to move back into the building last week,” said Parker.
The lack of access to the courts at Kenyon did not stop the team from training hard after returning to campus on Jan. 11.

“We practiced every day at the Millbrook School, about 40 minutes from Vassar, while Kenyon was prepared for opening,” said Siegel.

Women’s squash is now in the midst of a six-game winning streak, beginning with a win in early December against the University of Virginia (6-3) and culminating Jan. 25 with a powerful 5-4 victory over twelfth nationally-ranked Middlebury. Jihad won the decisive match 3-0 over Middlebury’s Caroline Woodworth, propelling the Brewers to the upset victory.
“With the Seven Sisters title and a follow-up victory against nationally ranked Middlebury later in the week, we aim to climb right back up the rankings by the end of the season,” said Parker.

The women’s team returns to the newly refurbished floors of Kenyon Hall this weekend looking to continue their winning streak, hosting Connecticut College and George Washington as a part of the Vassar Team Challenge.