The Brown men’s squash team competed last weekend in the College Squash Association’s Team Championships at Yale. The squad (8-12, Ivy 1-6) lost each of its matches, 8-1 to No. 9 Dartmouth, 7-2 to No. 12 Penn and 7-2 to No. 14 Navy. The previous weekend the women’s squad dropped all of its games in three losses to No. 1 Princeton, No. 5 Yale and No. 7 Stanford University in the CSA Team Championships.
The CSA Team Championships, collegiate squash’s national tournament, features 40 to 50 teams, said Blake Reinson ’14, the top-ranked player on the men’s team. Each team is sorted into a tier of eight schools and only plays other teams within its tier.
The women’s team (12-9, 2-5) was the final team in the first tier thanks to its No. 8 national ranking. Sarah Crosky ’13, co-captain and the three-seed for the women’s team, said it was Brown’s first time in the first tier since at least 2007.
Though the women’s squad failed to win a match last weekend, Crosky said the weekend was not all bad. “I take a lot of positives from it,” Crosky said.
But Crosky also said the team had hoped for a better outcome, particularly in its match against Stanford. “That’s just another thing to work on for next year,” Crosky said.
Reinson said the men’s team had a similar feeling, even though it also lost each of its matches.
“There was a lot of even competition,” Reinson said, “so we were hoping to have the chance to take down some of the teams that were around our level.”
The men’s squad, with its No. 16 national ranking, was placed in the second tier, which was headed by Dartmouth. The men’s squad had won its previous match against Dartmouth Feb. 2 with a score of 6-3. But it won each of the six games by default because Dartmouth benched several of its players for violations of team rules.
“It’s probably the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in college squash,” Reinson said.
Reinson said he believes the team had the potential to defeat Penn, its Saturday matchup, but the team was not playing at its highest level.
“(Saturday) was not our best day,” Reinson said. “I think on our best day, we could have taken (Penn).”
Reinson was responsible for two of Bruno’s five victories on the weekend, pulling out 3-2 wins against the top-ranked players from both Penn and Navy. Now he said he is looking forward to this weekend’s tournament, the CSA Individual Championships, which features the top 80 collegiate players.
Crosky said Brown typically sends two or three players each from the men’s and women’s squads to the individual championship tournament. Though Brown’s participants have not been determined yet, Reinson will join at least one other men’s player in addition to several players from the women’s squad.
Though Crosky has participated in the tournament in the past, she will sit out this year due to an injury that also plagued her during last weekend’s tournament play, a move she said she does not regret.
“I play better when I’m playing for a team, something larger than myself,” Crosky said. “I’m really happy having it end with Nationals, with my whole team.”
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