Men's, women's squash get off to rough start after winter break

The No. 26 men’s squash team started the new year on a disappointing note with consecutive losses to No. 17 Williams, No. 24 Dickinson College and No. 21 Bates. Its sole victory came against Stanford University, in which the Jumbos prevailed 9–0.

The No. 19 women’s squash team had a similar start to 2020 with losses against No. 13 Williams, No. 17 Bates and No. 5 Stanford, only prevailing over No. 22 Dickinson with a convincing 7–2 victory.

The Jumbos had a very intense training week in preparation for their match on Sunday against Williams, a perennial NESCAC rival.

“Williams is a really good team,” Sanjeev Jeyabalan, a first-year on the men's team, said. “We had an extremely intense training week after our match against Dickinson where the coach told us exactly what to do.”

Despite giving it their all, the Ephs got the better of Jumbos, with the men’s team losing 6–3 and the women’s team 9–0.

The women's and men's teams both had to battle against a difficult team, in addition to long hours of travel in their encounter against Dickinson on Jan. 18.

“The game against Dickinson was really tiring,” Vivaan Jaikishan, a first-year on the men's team, said. “We traveled for almost eight hours, which made it very difficult for us.”

Both teams ensured that their efforts did not go to waste, with the women’s team carving out a comfortable 7–2 victory and the men’s team suffering a narrow 5–4 defeat.

“I think we were right there against Dickinson,” first-year Kunal Valia on the men’s team said. “They probably just wanted it more than us on that particular day."

Jaikishan was the sole victor for Tufts in the match against Bates on Jan. 14, as the men's team lost 8–1. The women’s team, too, fought very hard before bowing down 6–3 in a close encounter against Bates. Although the end results didn’t reflect the amount of effort put in by the Jumbos, most of the matches went down to the wire.

“We lost 8–1 against Bates, but the games were really close,” Jaikishan said. “Four out of the eight matches we lost went to five sets.”

This rough stretch of the season came on the heels of an intense November and December, which concluded in a contrasting fashion for the Jumbos, with the men’s team narrowly upsetting No. 23 Bowdoin and the women’s team defeating No. 21 Bowdoin.

They were back in action for an intense five-day training session at Stanford, which ended with a match on Jan. 8 against the Cardinal. The women's team lost 9–0, while the men's team won by the same score.

Valia explained that the training camp at Stanford really got the entire team close to one another.

“It’s a really nice team to be a part of,” Valia said. “We were with each other 24/7 throughout the trip. The support I get from my teammates keeps me motivated and makes the process a lot more fun.”

“Over the break we were just asked to recover, rest and maintain fitness,” first-year Shloke Sahay said. “At Stanford, we were training multiple times every day so that helped us get back to the grind."

With the opening of the new squash courts at the Steve Tisch Sports and Fitness Center next week, the Jumbos are elated at the opportunity of being able to play in front of their home crowd and save time and effort on traveling.

“We are all very excited,” Valia said. “It’s gonna save us a lot of time in terms of traveling and give us more flexibility in terms of practice schedule.”

Sahay also commented on how the opening of the courts would help in increasing frequency of training sessions.

“Earlier we could only practice at a fixed time but now we can train whenever we want to,” Sahay said. “We can now train more and we won’t waste time on traveling.”

Both the men's and women's teams next play Amherst on Jan. 31, and then against Connecticut College on Feb. 1 in the inaugural match on the new courts.