Squash: Men sweep Ivy opener, but rival Penn upsets women

In their Ivy League openers against Penn on Saturday, both the women’s and men’s squash teams hit some difficulties. Both teams engaged in tough battles — the women’s team experienced some unlucky bounces, as none of the tight matches went their way, while the men remained more fortunate and managed to come away with a victory.

Having performed extremely well at the Ivy League scrimmages and starting the season strong with two perfect matches against Franklin & Marshall and Middlebury — sweeping both teams without dropping a single game — the women’s team (2-1) struggled to maintain that momentum against the Quakers, losing 6-3.

“We had a great result at the Ivy scrimmages a few weeks back, so we’re definitely disappointed with how the weekend turned out,” junior Julie Cerullo said.

The men’s team (3-0), on the other hand, defeated Penn 9-0, but the match was in fact much tighter than the final score reveals. Five of the individual matches went to four or five games.

“It was a pretty good win,” junior Todd Harrity said. “Honestly, we didn’t all play our best, but it was good that we won. A lot of us were down in our matches and were able to fight back and win.”

Penn took an early lead on the women’s side, leading 3-1 after the first shift. Notwithstanding, freshman Nicole Bunyan won her Ivy League debut 3-1 at No. 8. Cerullo earned Princeton a win during the second shift, along with sophomore Lexi Saunders, but the Quakers managed to come out on top during the remaining close matches.

Although the Tigers, currently ranked No. 3 in the nation, are loaded with talent, the young team — with an underclassman majority — lacks experience.

“Our freshmen and sophomores have jumped around a bit in the lineup,” Cerullo said. “The positive of that is our players at No. 6-9 are really close in level, though, so we really do have depth.”

As a result of this inexperience, each of the players fought in close games, but none seemed to go Princeton’s way. At No. 7, freshman Alex Lunt came within two points of winning each game, and sophomore Alex Sawin came back from a 2-0 deficit with back-to-back 12-10 wins to press her opponent to five games at No. 6 before ultimately falling short.

The men’s match similarly endured tough battles, but the Tigers managed to come out on top with a hard-earned victory. Princeton took control from the start, with the most difficult match at No. 8 where sophomore Ash Egan was pushed to five close games but ultimately won the last game 11-8. The team fought hard in all of the matches in the second shift, especially freshman Taylor Tutrone at No. 9. Tutrone played just three games, but each of those games extended beyond the 11-point mark with scores of 19-17, 15-13 and 16-14. The other second-shift matches all went to at least four games.

“Even though I think we could have played better, everyone did a good job competing under pressure,” Harrity said.

The matches this weekend were tougher than expected, reminding the teams of some lessons to remember for the rest of the season.

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“I think something that we took away from this match is that you can never underestimate your opponents,” Harrity said. “We went into this match a little too relaxed. Everyone wants to beat us, and if we want to win the national championship then we have to put in the work and put in the energy. We need to be very focused every time we play.”

The women also said they are viewing the difficulty they experienced this past weekend positively.

“It’s the best thing that could have happened to us,” Cerullo said. “It hit us a little hard, and we expected to come out on top, but we have until after winter break before our next tough match, so there’s a stretch of hard training that we’re looking forward to.”

For the women, the unfulfilling weekend serves not just as a reminder to work hard but as motivation to keep up their work ethic in preparation for matches to come.

“We don’t like this feeling, and we can definitely turn it around,” Cerullo said.