Sports

Bold squash team stunds Bard

In print | February 12, 2009

Among the athletic facilities on Swarthmore’s quiet campus lies an old building. The dirty windows shroud the inside, covering the relatively unknown squash courts, the relatively unused squash courts. This mysterious building is where Swarthmore’s newly formed club squash team does not practice. The facility goes unused altogether except by the soccer and lacrosse teams, who run drills there when the field house is taken and the fields are out of commission.

Usually, something new draws a lot of attention. A new television show is met with commercial hype. Movies are the same way. Most impressive of all are the new faces in sports. Rookie phenoms get eaten up by the press. From the debut of Sidney Crosby to those of Lebron James and Carmelo Anthony, there are few things more exciting than a new sensation.

Now, Swarthmore College has a new sensation of its own, but much like their facility, they are overlooked. The Swarthmore club squash team was founded last semester by Tarit Rao-Chakravorti ’12. Now, he and teammates Manuk Garg ’12, Rahul Garg ’11, Jason Yun ’12, Rakan Nimr ’12 and Jora Dhaliwal ’12 have made history. These six students did something extraordinary last weekend: despite having come into existence only in late November, they took down a Bard college squash team that has been a varsity program for 18 years. Even more impressive than the victory was the effort and resolve it took to hold the match in the first place.

Rao-Chakravorti has been playing squash since his youth and came to Swarthmore from the acclaimed Milton Academy in Boston, which is home to one of the most successful high school squash programs of all-time. “If I couldn’t play squash, I don’t know if I could have stayed at Swat,” Rao-Chakravorti said. “I started by e-mailing the ADs at both Haverford and Swarthmore.” He initially tried to play for Haverford’s team, but was denied because he isn’t a student there. “So I tried to start my own team,” he said. He put an ad in the RSD and held a meeting for anyone interested, but to his dismay, “only two other people showed up.”

Rao-Chakravorti found more interested students by talking to classmates and generally spreading interest. The six-player team is registered under the Collegiate Squash Association as an “emerging team,” which is a label specifically for schools with newly-formed squash programs, and it plays matches with their top five players rather than their top seven, like standard varsity programs. But numbers weren’t the new team’s only obstacle.

“We had to take over the charter from the already existing squash club. I had to e-mail a ton of people at Haverford and figure out our practice schedule there, and we had to front the money for the CSA registration,” Rao-Chakravorti explained. The challenges seemed to never end. In addition to these obstacles, transportation has also been a main concern.

Because of insufficient funds and the unavailability of any school vans, the team had to borrow a car just to make it to Bard, and had to play Lafayette College on the same day to avoid the hassle of another travel day. “The two matches we had to play in one day was not a normal thing. Squash is exhausting so that’s pretty tough,” Rao-Chakravorti said.

Bard agreed to play Swarthmore under emerging team rules, so Bard played their top five against the Swarthmore only five. Swarthmore blew them out of the water, taking four out of five matches.
The excitement of this team’s accomplishments thus far is only outshined by their prospective future. Despite late registration, the Swarthmore team will be competing in this year’s Collegiate Squash Nationals at Princeton University in New Jersey, February 20-22. “After reading Tarit’s RSD post, this team has been much more successful than I thought it would be. I thought it would just be like a club where we played each other. I never thought we’d go to nationals and I’m really happy about it,” Yun said.

“It’s incredible how this has evolved into a varsity team,” added Garg, who has been through this before; his high school didn’t have a varsity squash team. “With no courts and no coach, just a couple of guys, in just a few months we’ve formed this competitive team.”

Nationals will pose a new challenge to the young team. Currently, the team has no way of getting to Princeton. Even with SBC funding, the team has $200 to allot to jerseys and transportation.
Despite these challenges, such an opportunity is truly phenomenal. Competing at nationals will be a challenge, but finding a way to get to Princeton will be even more of one. Still, something about this team’s history says they’ll figure it out.