Men's Squash

After 32 years as head coach of the men’s squash team, U.S. Squash Hall of Fame inductee Bob Callahan ’77 has announced that he will retire. Callahan led the Tigers to 11 Ivy League titles, three national championships and 316 career victories for a .823 win percentage.

The men’s squash team is gearing up for another run at a national championship, as the Tigers will travel to New Haven this weekend to see if they can repeat last year’s victory. Princeton (10-2 overall, 6-1 Ivy League) is coming off another fantastic season and has the number-two ranking in this weekend’s upcoming CSA Team Championships. Princeton’s only two losses came against Trinity and Cornell in two of the final three games of the regular season.

Trinity College avenged last year’s national championship loss as the Bantams defeated the Tigers at Jadwin on Saturday in the last game of the regular season for both teams. Princeton, the co-Ivy League Champions (sharing with the winner of Harvard vs. Yale on February 18), came into the weekend 10-1, its only loss coming in a close 4-5 game against Cornell, while Trinity was undefeated. Both teams were ranked in the top five, but in the end Trinity was able to pull out the victory 6-3.

Before the afternoon of Feb. 19, 2012, 13 consecutive chapters in the chronicles of men’s collegiate squash had ended in the same manner, with Trinity College winning the national title. Last year, victory in the finals of the CSA Team Championships seemed inevitable for the Bantams once again: They faced a beatable Princeton lineup, a team that they had defeated 7-2 just a few weeks before. However, on their home turf at the Jadwin courts, the Tigers changed the history books, as coach Bob Callahan’s players won Princeton’s first national title since 1993. This weekend, Trinity returns to Princeton for the first time since last year, in what promises to be one of the nation’s most electrifying matches of the season.

From 2003 through 2006, Yasser El Halaby ’06 won four straight men’s squash individual national championships. Though sophomore Todd Harrity will never equal El Halaby’s extended run of dominance, Harrity’s second-year campaign exceeded even the lofty standards set by his predecessor.