El Halaby tops off career with fourth NCAA title

During Yasser El Halaby's four years at Princeton, the opponents whom he battled on the squash court only rarely presented a true challenge. From the beginning, really, it was clear that his toughest foe was something greater: history.

The whispers began long before El Halaby arrived on campus: the young man hailing from Cairo, Egypt, had a chance to be something special. The talk grew louder when he debuted as the Tigers' No. 1 player as freshman and began demolishing players three or four years his senior. By the time he won his first individual national championship that spring, the chatter was deafening: if he kept it up, he would go down as the greatest college squash player — ever.

It was an enormous amount of pressure to put on the shoulders of an 18-year-old, but El Halaby quietly bore the weight of those expectations with poise and humility. Despite the giant bull's-eye on his back, he continued dispatching foes with remarkable ease and repeated as individual national champion his sophomore and junior years, tying the record of three consecutive national titles.

Nothing, it seemed, could stop El Halaby's coronation this year. Until this February that is, when an ill-fitting pair of shoes left him with a painful foot injury, throwing him off his game for several weeks. But he returned in top form for the national team tournament, leading the Tigers to a near upset of seven-time defending champion Trinity College in the championship match. El Halaby dominated the Bantams' top player that day, of course, much to the delight of the overflowing crowd that had packed Jadwin Gym's C Floor to see his final home match.

Two weeks later, in Amherst, Mass., El Halaby put the finishing touches on his unmatched legacy, destroying Harvard's Siddharth Suchde — "probably the finest Yasser has ever played," head coach Bob Callahan '77 gushed afterward — to claim his fourth consecutive individual national championship.

Perhaps it is impossible to assess the accomplishments of a career so recently completed. Already, though, this much is clear: El Halaby is the type of once-in-a-generation talent who makes teammates' and competitors' jaws drop in awe, an athlete who drew fans who knew nothing about squash to attend his matches for the sake of witnessing a legend in action. And so it is almost certain that, one day, El Halaby will be included in the pantheon of all-time Orange and Black greats, his name mentioned in the same breath with those of Baker, Kazmaier and Bradley.

In recognition of these accomplishments, the 'Prince' is honored — for an unprecedented third time — to name Yasser El Halaby its 2005-2006 Male Athlete of the Year.