Women's Squash: Disappointing finish for Tigers at Howe Cup

Princeton started off the tournament on a high note, defeating Brown 9-0. The Tigers’ match with Trinity, however, was not as successful. After their scheduled match earlier this month was canceled due to snow, Trinity prevailed 6-3 in Saturday’s highly anticipated match. Princeton also lost 7-2 to Penn in Sunday’s third-place match after defeating the Quakers 9-0 earlier in the season.

Although this weekend did not go as planned for the Tigers, there were positives to take away. Princeton continued to dominate the lower spots, as it has all season long, with two of its three wins against Trinity coming from the Tigers’ bottom two. Additionally, junior Libby Eyre, who plays second for the Tigers, won an incredibly hard-fought, five-game-long battle against Trinity’s Catalina Pelaez.

“It’s tough to come in as the number one seed,” sophomore Nicole Bunyan, who finished her freshman season ranked 21st in the country, said. “You have a lot of pressure on you, and we still felt like underdogs because we had to live up to that number-one seed. It’s tough because on any given day, any of these teams can outplay you if you’re not at your best. Sometimes things go your way, and sometimes they don’t.”

The disappointing weekend capped off an exceptional season. The Tigers went 11-0 during the regular season, won the Ivy League title and were the only team to beat Harvard, which won the national championship Sunday. Bunyan said she and her teammates had bittersweet memories of this season, having been so successful but not accomplishing their ultimate goal.

“I think we’ll look back and say ‘Wow, we beat Harvard. We beat Penn 9-0,’ ” she said. “This is going to give us motivation for next year. Hopefully this feeling of not doing as well as we expected to will carry us through and give us motivation for next season.”

On Sunday, Bunyan said that the loss to Penn may have been due to residual disappointment from the Trinity loss.

“There might have been a little bit of [a letdown],” she said. “I think we were ready to rally today, though. I just think that sometimes it’s the luck of the draw, about who gets the breaks. Today there were two or three matches that went to five games. Today it just didn’t go our way.”

For the Tigers, this weekend’s outcome is very similar to last year’s results, but this Princeton team had higher expectations.

“It has crossed my mind, but I don’t think of it as a repeating thing,” Bunyan said of the results. “It definitely does affect us a little bit, but it definitely will give us extra motivation. We have all improved so much this year. If we can improve that much again next year, we will do even better. I am optimistic.”

Bunyan’s optimism is not unwarranted. Although the Tigers finished the season in a disappointing fashion, Princeton returns eight of its nine top players, losing only senior Julie Cerullo, who plays first for the Tigers. With added motivation and almost all key players returning, next year’s Princeton team has the potential to be better than this year’s and could be a contender for the Howe Cup trophy this time next year.