There is some good news and some bad news for the Penn men's squash team heading into this weekend's College Squash Association Team Championships, held at Yale and Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Conn.
The good news is that the Quakers' eighth-place ranking can only go up, as they are entered as the last seed in the eight-team Potter Division for the nation's top programs.
The bad news is that awaiting them for a first-round matchup Friday at Choate will be the nation's top team, the Trinity College Bantams, currently on a 105-match winning streak.
As if this were not enough, Penn has also lost to each of the other seven teams in its division.
In a sport where upsets are extremely rare, Penn's coach and players know exactly what to expect out of this weekend's first match, but believe that after that, the event is wide open. Penn coach Craig Thorpe-Clark believes that there is a noticeable gap between the elite and the rest of the division.
"We feel that probably with the exception of the top four, any of those teams are beatable," Thorpe-Clark said.
Atop the Quakers' ladder will be freshman Gilly Lane, the No. 12 player in the country, who will draw a first-round rematch with Trinity's Michael Ferreira, the nation's fifth-ranked player. Ferreira beat Lane, 9-2, 9-3, 9-4, in the Bantams' 8-1 victory over the Quakers Jan. 24.
Lane certainly does not dismiss the rematch as a lost cause.
"He beat me pretty well," Lane said. "But I've been working really hard the last couple of months to get ready for this."
Part of this preparation was strategic, as Lane has developed a good idea of how to be more competitive next time.
"He's more of an attacking player," Lane said of the Stamford, England native. "I think I just need to be a little bit more patient."
Encountering a foreign-born player on the Bantams is not a rarity. In fact, nine of their 16 players are international student-athletes.
The recruitment of top players from other nations has been part of the reason that Trinity has not lost a match since 1998. While squash is usually a low-profile sport, Trinity appeared on ESPN's SportsCenter after beating the Colby College on Feb. 7.
After the Trinity match, the road should get easier for the Quakers, but not much easier. A second- round matchup pits the winners of the Penn match against the Princeton-Dartmouth victor, and the losers also play on Saturday. The Tigers beat Penn, 7-2, while the Big Green enjoyed a 6-3 victory over the Quakers.
Despite having lost to every team ranked above them, the Quakers view some matchups as more favorable than others. Penn junior Eric Bardawil said that his team matches up best against Dartmouth and Cornell.
As is always the case with squash teams, Penn's lineup is constantly changing as a result of mid-week challenge matches. This weekend, sophomore Jacob Himmelrich will move up to the No. 3 spot in the ladder with freshman Ben Ende dropping to No. 4. Also, freshman Graham Bassett will enter the top nine at No. 8.
Penn began the season ranked fifth by the College Squash Association, and the Quakers made it a collective goal to stay true to that preseason assessment. While the team's ranking has dropped, the expectations have not.
Perhaps Bardawil expressed this feeling the best.
"We were fifth wanting to be fifth," he said. "Now we're eighth wanting to be fifth."
