His last national title came last season, when Princeton snapped Trinity’s 13-year winning streak to win the Tigers’ first championship since 1993. But 2012 was a bittersweet year for Callahan — just a short time after he won the title, doctors discovered that Callahan had a malignant brain tumor.
“As I said back then, I still believe I’ve just been remarkably lucky,” Callahan told The Daily Princetonian in December. “The tumor came at the right time; it came at the right place.”
Despite the diagnosis, he decided to return in 2013 to coach the Tigers for another year, which would be his last.
“I think we all were kind of shocked a bit, but it was one of those things where it’s tough what he’s going through and we all kind of understand to a certain extent the battle that he’s had with his disease,” junior Dylan Ward said. “I think that during the end of the season it really did take a toll on him, and I think it was incredibly courageous for him to come out and coach us this year, dealing with his cancer.”
Many of his players cite that tenacity, along with Callahan’s moral code, as a reason for the team’s success in recent years.
“He’s always the kind of guy that tells you to respect everyone,” sophomore Tyler Osbourne said. “He’s always someone to look up to, someone to respect.”
The values that Callahan tried to instill in his players translated off the court. Last season his team was awarded the men’s College Squash Association’s Sloane Award for Sportsmanship, an honor given to the team that “best exemplifies the ideals of sportsmanship throughout the season.”
“Coach really embodies a true gentleman,” Ward said. “He always emphasized the importance of maintaining a degree of respect, win or lose, with your opponents, and within the locker room and whenever you talk with him, everything is always cut dry, but very respectful and classy.”
Callahan set the standard for his career in 1981 during his first season as head coach. His Tigers went undefeated on the season, winning both the Ivy League and the Intercollegiate Squash Association national title.
Callahan’s players have won 10 individual national championships. Yasser El Halaby ’06, widely considered the best player in college squash history, won four of those titles in consecutive years from 2003 to 2006 under Callahan’s tutelage. Senior Todd Harrity most recently won one in 2011. This year, Harrity was also a co-winner of the Skillman Award, an annual award given to a senior men’s squash player “who has demonstrated outstanding sportsmanship during his entire college career.”
“I learned a lot from him — not just squash, but just to be a better person,” Osbourne said.
Tactically, Callahan’s coaching style could be considered quite unorthodox. Although he has coached 384 matches for the men’s squash team, it’s unclear how many of those he has actually watched.
“If you ask a lot of us, we’ll all say he’s a nervous wreck during all of our big matches, and a lot of the times when it comes down to the wire, he ends up not even really watching the actual match,” sophomore David Hoffman said. “He just ends up kind of standing over to the side and watching the reactions of the crowd to see if our guy wins or not.”
After winning the 2012 championship, however, the team was able to witness the nerves and emotion that Callahan kept hidden during all of those big matches.
“[After the final match], talking with us, it was apparent how much it meant to him that we got to win a national championship after a long time,” Hoffman said. “Just seeing that kind of emotion on a guy that doesn’t let us see that kind of emotion from him all that often was a really awesome thing.”
Osbourne said that given the time and dedication that Callahan put into the program, it will be difficult to adjust to a replacement.
“But at the same time we’ve got three classes of players who have played under Coach [Callahan] that all know each other very well,” Osbourne said. “Hopefully as a team we can work together to aid in this transition of helping the new coach settle in as well as work with him to try and strengthen our team for next year.”
Callahan will now leave the position that he has held for 32 years, but his players contend that his legacy will remain in college squash.
“He is the classiest guy I know, and everyone on the team will vouch for it. He’s really a true legend of the game because of the sort of real level of respect that he upholds for us, the guys on the team and all of the other coaches and all of the other opposing teams,” said Ward. “He really does try to make sure that there’s a certain integrity to squash. He’s really held it together, I think, for college within the past 32 years as our head coach and also as the head of college squash.”
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