This weekend at the Team Championships in Boston, the Penn men's squash team learned that consolation round matches do matter.
The Quakers finished their season on a high note despite losing their first-round matchup to Princeton on Friday. They persevered and defeated Dartmouth and Cornell very soundly in the consolation round to win the so-called "loser's round" of the Potter Division tournament -- putting the Quakers in fifth place in the nation.
The 38 teams participating in the weekend's competition were split up according to rank into six separate divisions, each with its own bracket.
Penn was in the top bracket with the rest of the eight best squash teams in the country and with rival Princeton in the first round.
The Tigers prevailed 6-3 last time the two teams met, so the Quakers were looking to get off to a strong start against the Tigers on Friday.
This task was not as easy as it looked, as the Red and Blue quickly lost its first two matches. But in the third match against the Orange and Black, there appeared to be a glimmer of hope as Penn's Colby Emerson took the Tigers' Rob Siverd into four games.
Penn's No. 9 player was leading Siverd, 7-3, in the fourth game and gaining momentum when he went down with a bad hamstring injury. With Emerson unable to finish, the match went to Princeton by default.
Coach Craig Thorpe-Clark lamented his team's early loss to injury, seeing it as the turning point of the entire match.
"If Colby would have been able to finish his match, we would have fared better," Thorpe-Clark said. "There is a very thin line between winning and losing."
The three early losses set the match's tone as the Quakers went down 8-1 and were knocked into the consolation bracket.
That loss was not the end of the road, however, as Penn's next match was against a Dartmouth team who had come up just short last time, losing 5-4 to the Quakers.
"We felt like Dartmouth had a lot of confidence," junior Jacob Himmelrich said. "But the first result was a fluke, not because we had won, but because it was so close."
The Big Green found out that Himmelrich was right, as they lost the day's first three matches.
"We came out very strong against Dartmouth, winning the first three matches comfortably," Thorpe-Clark said. "We then had a commanding lead the whole way through."
The Quakers cruised to a 7-2 victory behind the outstanding play of Gilly Lane, Rich Repetto and Himmelrich, who defeated Dartmouth's Adam King.
Himmelrich's loss to King in the earlier match provided the junior with the fuel to power his 9-0 shutout in their first game on Saturday.
Thorpe-Clark admired both Himmelrich's and his entire team's toughness in coming back from a loss so strongly.
Sunday's fifth-place match against Cornell provided him with another opportunity to witness his team's determination.
Despite struggling early on and letting two of the first three matches slip away, the Quakers went undefeated for the rest of the way and won once again, 7-2.
The win solidified Penn's season ending position at No. 5, making this team the best the University has seen in more than 10 years.
"We're delighted with the tournament's results," Thorpe-Clark said. "To come back from a tough loss, physically and emotionally, and have two emphatic wins really says something about their resilience."
Himmelrich agreed.
"Even though we weren't able to knock off the perennial powers of squash, we gave them a much better run and put ourselves on their radar."
