Jumbos to kick off season Saturday at Wesleyan tournament

The nationally ranked No. 26 women’s squash team will enter its 2014 winter campaign with the Wesleyan Round Robin in Middletown, Conn. this weekend. Tufts will take on Wesleyan and William Smith College on Saturday as well as Smith College and Mount Holyoke College on Sunday.

“We should do well against Smith, William Smith and Mount Holyoke,” senior tri-captain Paige Dahlman said. “Wesleyan will be a toss up.”

“I definitely think we have a chance of beating Wesleyan this year, however, it has not [happened] at my time at Tufts that we have beaten Wesleyan, so [it was] upwards of four years ago,” senior tri-captain Ann Bellinger said. 

The team has five new players this year, four of whom are first-years. First -years Lauren Banner, Nellie Harvey, Gabi Salomon and Claudia Udolf have joined the ten-member roster, which is missing junior tri-captain Paget Stanco who is abroad for the semester. This new dynamic is certainly different from previous seasons. Bellinger noted how before the season started, she and Dahlman had been nervous about having essentially an entirely new team, but their concerns have dissipated since the team started working out together.

“Everyone gets along so well,” Bellinger said. “It feels like we’ve been on the team together for years, [as] opposed to not even a semester. Udolf, one of our freshmen, will be playing No. 1 in the fall, and Banner ... will be playing four.”

Dahlman added that throughout the entire ladder, every player is relatively close in skill and incredibly competitive, so everyone spreads out well throughout the top nine.

Although the team has a relatively busy winter season, playing 10 matches in a three-week span, the majority of its matches will take place in the spring. Stanco, who has played in the top spot in the past, will certainly change the line-up for the spring semester when she returns from her semester abroad. Dahlman, however, has faith that the current roster will overcome any adversity that might arise with a top player's absence.

“Even though Stanco is abroad, each person on the team last year has gotten better,” Dahlman said. “Plus, the fall season is going to be a time to see what we can do as a team. We need to figure out what we do well and what we need to work on. Thankfully, the matches we see in the spring are going to be the more important ones.”

After this weekend, the team will play Wellesley, Conn. College, Hamilton, Middlebury, Vassar and Colby before heading into winter break. Despite obviously wanting to perform well against these schools, Tufts will have a second opportunity to at least play Colby and Conn. College again in the spring. The winter season consists mainly of individual matches, whereas the spring consists of both individual matches as well as the College Squash Association (CSA) Team Championships and the CSA Individual Championships. Although the Jumbos have a busy year ahead of themselves, Dahlman is confident in her unified team -- a team that is pushing itself harder to make practice more productive, and hoping that its results in games reflect that.

Correction: November 13, 2014

In a previous version of this article, a quote was incorrectly attributed to senior Ann Bellinger. The quote was, in fact, from senior Paige Dahlman.