Despite ending the first half of its season with a 2-5 record, the men's squash team enters the winter offseason with optimism knowing that when it returns to the court in the spring, its lineup will be bolstered and ready to take on the healthy competition that still lies ahead.
Saturday saw the team overcome the MIT Engineers 6-3 to close out its fall semester campaign with a victory. The contest, however, might have been closer than the Jumbos were expecting; Tufts had swept MIT handily 9-0 in each of the past three seasons. But with a roster that awaits the return of several key mid-lineup starters from abroad, the squad has been fielding a number of freshmen and upperclassmen that have seen limited matchplay during their Tufts squash careers.
"I think we're glad to have [the win], but that said I think we went into it a little too lackadaisical and so we had to address that at the end especially," senior tri-captain Brian Rassel said. "Even though we won 6-3, it was mostly our new guys who lost toward the back at [No.] 7 through 9, but it wasn't so much a problem there, just that other than our No. 1 and 2, almost everybody struggled somewhere in their match against a team which we were expecting to get a little bit more from."
Meanwhile, play on Thursday saw the team suffer its fifth sweep of the year: a 9-0 defeat at the hands of the Amherst Lord Jeffs. The outcome stood in stark contrast to a pair of bouts with Amherst last season, when the Jumbos dropped two narrow 5-4 decisions to the Lord Jeffs, though with the team's new-look and, admittedly ephemeral until the spring, lineup for the fall, Thursday's result was not unexpected. The team was also playing very shorthanded, with players abroad and others out due to illness, so the Jumbos had to default the No. 9 match before even taking court.
"In the van I was driving back in, we were talking about whether we're going to get a shot to play them again at either the NESCAC Tournament or Nationals because I think that we felt that if we were all playing at our appropriate spot in the ladder that they were a team we could compete with," Rassel said. "Just like the way you can't compare last year's team to this year's team, it's a whole new dynamic ... so we're just hoping to get that opportunity [of playing Amherst again], and I don't think we're dwelling too much on that loss."
"Amherst is a good team; they've got a good program and they definitely treated us with respect out there on the courts," senior tri-captain Josh Levinson added.
In terms of positive learning points netted from yet another 9-0 loss this fall, Levinson said that he was struck by the composure of the players in the face of having to play at a higher-than-normal slot on the starting roster.
"In every match there were at least one or two points where you could see a transition to a focus level," Levinson said. "And again it's difficult going into a match already defaulting our bottom match and stepping up on the ladder, [but] it was so good to see that transition even if it happened for one or two points."
With the fall portion of the season behind them, the Jumbos hit the winter offseason primed for the return of abroad competitors who will strengthen the team considerably. And even though it suffered five 9-0 sweeps en route to its 2-5 record, Tufts purposefully scheduled difficult matches for the fall while saving the more meaningful competition for the spring portion of its season in anticipation of having its full lineup.
"We're really excited about gearing up for the second half of the season and taking a whole new level of focus because every time we swing the racket it's going to be a win or lose situation as opposed to this fall where [our match results] turned out exactly as anticipated," Rassel said. "There wasn't a lot of doubt or question about that, so we're excited to get into the real part of the season where the focus is better because a lot more is going to be riding on it."
"We definitely started the season with some of the best competition we face in the entire year, and against teams like that, to have that experience is important," Levinson added. "And to have that experience of playing quality opponents and ending the season on a win, and looking into winter break knowing that we're getting our reinforcements, is good too."
As part of its offseason preparation for the spring, the Jumbos will take a five-day training trip to the Cayman Islands, where they will scrimmage other squads and practice twice daily. Once that concludes, they expect to utilize the knowledge gleaned from a fall of tough competition and combine with that the return of their abroad players in order to take on future competition in full stride.
"I'd say right now in the fall we had a good practice schedule. It was a lot of work; we had some training with the trainers at the gym and going off that experience, putting a little more focus on pre-match preparation and then taking advantage of this break," Levinson said. "And I really feel that the combination of the new players and the combination of what we're going to do, we will have a different team."
