PRINCETON, N.J.
If you walked into Princeton's Jadwin Gym last night, you wouldn't have been impressed. The basketball court and its vast surroundings were empty with the exception of one middle-aged man running laps around the track.
But if you had ventured two floors down into the depths of the massive structure, you would have found a Penn-Princeton rivalry as strong as the one on the hardwood -- and also one that was too one-sided even to be called a rivalry.
Funny how results make all the difference.
Although both of Penn's squash teams lost, the men were at least in the match, while the women were blanked 9-0 in the match and 3-0 in each game. And the coaches' views on the matchup between the two schools could not have been more different.
While the men's team lost last night and has historically been on the short end of the rivalry, coach Craig Thorpe-Clark still circles the matchup with the Orange and Black on his calendar every year.
"I think Penn and Princeton have a pretty healthy competitive spirit," Thorpe-Clark said. "And it's no different for the squash teams."
But what sets it apart from the rivalry on the gridiron or on the basketball court is the level to which the players are familiar with each other.
"Squash is a very small community," Thorpe-Clark said. "So I guess in basketball and football, they're getting kids from California or wherever; squash is mostly East Coast."
While in basketball, it is in the rarest of occasions that high school teammates will occupy opposite collegiate benches, in squash, the private high school and East Coast nature of the sport creates a situation where high school teammates are often split between Red and Blue and Orange and Black.
Add to this the Junior tournaments which tend to draw the same players on a regular basis, and it is not uncommon for large portions of opposing squads to know each other coming into a match.
And although this is just as true in the women's game, Penn coach Jack Wyant would not call the matchup a rivalry simply "because they're better than us most years."
He, unlike Thorpe-Clark, dismissed the notion that the Princeton match was something special, even though Wyant himself is a Princeton graduate.
"I want to win every match," Wyant said. "I don't care what school it is."
Women's captain Rohini Gupta even suggested that the Quakers have a true rival a little farther to the North.
"I would think ... the first game we'd circle on our calendars this year is Brown," Gupta said. "It was a very close match; [Princeton] was much tougher."
This proved to be a good choice this season as the Quakers traveled to Providence, R.I. and squeaked by the Bears, 5-4, while the Princeton score was as one-sided as could be.
But regardless of what the coaches and players think about the rivalry, the fans last night -- going back and forth between cheers for the visiting Quakers and the home Tigers -- made their thoughts clear: when Penn and Princeton get together, it's a rivalry.
Zachary Levine is a sophomore mathematics major from Delmar, N.Y., and is Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is zlevine@sas.upenn.edu.
