There are a lot of entertaining stories going on in the sports world right now. Jeremy Lin continues to defy his doubters, Peyton Manning's return to the Colts is providing an interesting subplot to the upcoming NFL draft and baseball even made the headlines today after Albert Pujol reported to a different spring training camp for the first time in his 11-year career.
In a time of the year that's usually known for being the doldrums of the sporting calendar when ESPN typically relegates 45 minute-segments to Todd McShay and Mel Kiper Jr. debating the fourth best strong safety in their infamous "draft lab" regular season play of the NBA, NHL and NCAA basketball has made watching sports on television a pleasant surprise. But for anyone who loves a good sports story, there's one story practically guaranteed not to make headlines that took place just over this weekend. Due to the relative popularity of the sport, this story may never even reach ESPN's bottom line. Yes, I'm talking about squash.
Even at it's most riveting, squash is only good for making about one big splash a year. For the past 14 years, the token video segment that makes it to SportsCenter has been a mention of the indelible Trinity College continuing its remarkable winning streak the longest in the history of intercollegiate varsity sports.
The streak spanned nearly a decade and a half and included 252 straight matches and 13 consecutive national championships. I don't care if you're playing two drunk '15 girls in pong doing anything that many times in a row is almost incomprehensible. Sure, there were a lot of factors Trinity had going for it that enabled it to compete at such a high level. People slandered the program for having lower recruiting standards than its Ivy League counterparts, enabling it to admit former professional international players from the likes of India, Pakistan and other places abroad (where squash is played at its highest level) to beat up on hapless American junior players. College squash became synonymous with the cult of their success. Parity did not exist.
But in case you dozed off for three minutes of the 11 a.m. SportsCenter on Jan. 19, that streak came to an end by virtue of a 5-4 loss at the hands of Yale University this year. This was squash's annual big media moment. The sport blew its proverbial load in the middle of its season, almost exactly a month before the national champion would be decided.
Yale went on to lose to Princeton University in the regular season, 8-1. Trinity would go on to beat Princeton by a commanding 7-2 margin. All 14 members of the squash world were stumped. On one hand, they had to deal with the confusing development that they would not actually know for sure who was going to win the national championship for the first time since the 20th century. An even scarier possibility was that just when the giant's shadow had fallen, when the slightest hope emerged for a changing of the guard in squash, Trinity could rebound from its loss and still win its 14th straight national championship.
This was the basis of the subplot behind this weekend's nationals, which were held at Princeton's Jadwin Gymnasium. Four years ago in the very same space, the Tigers had fallen at the hands of Trinity, 5-4. On Sunday, they once again faced off in the finals.
The match was one of the most emotional sporting events I have ever witnessed. It was a five-hour marathon during which each individual match seemingly grew in intensity as the gallery had to be closed because of capacity crowds. As an objectively neutral observer, I had the interesting perspective of seeing the Princeton faithful will on the home team in the comfort of their own courts. An even more interesting dynamic occurred within Trinity's ranks. Their students shuttled to Princeton that weekend in droves. Heaps of former players, famed All-Americans who had played vital roles in the streak also returned not just to watch, but to coach the current players between games. Trinity's entourage numbered in the hundreds, willing themselves to victory against the entirety of the squash world that wanted to see them fail. They'd taken on the role of the outsider in the blue-blooded world of squash, the axiomatic "safety school" clinging to its waning superiority over its Ivy League counterparts.
In the end, Princeton's senior captain Kelly Shannon felled the mighty giant with a feathery drop shot that South African Reinhold Hergeth couldn't retrieve. As throngs of Princeton fans swarmed the court, hoisting Shannon onto their shoulders amidst chants of "Kell-y, Kell-y," I wandered downstairs to the area where players enter and exit. Hergeth lay silently outside of the court while fans continued to pour in from all sides around him. His eyes were closed and his hands folded perfectly still across his chest. Despite all of the pandemonium around him, I couldn't help but notice that he seemed to be, at least for the moment, at peace.
