Critique of American Men's College Squash Off the Mark

by Sasha Cooke

Ted Gross's piece bemoaning the paucity of Americans on top intercollegiate Squash teams misses the point by a wide mark, although this is understandable, given the odd nature of the situation.  He writes,"My guess is this isn’t how the Heights Casino parents, among others, envisioned things playing out when the juniors and colleges switched from hardball to softball, but that’s another story."  In fact, the switch to softball has little to do with the trend toward recruitment of foreign players.  Anil Nayar, Darius Pandole, Cyrus Mehta, Tal Ben-Shakar and others long ago proved that international players could be key contributors to championship teams with the hard ball.  Most tellingly, in the mid-80's the F&M team, with three Indian players in their top four, came within one point of beating Harvard. Why didn't the F& M coach think of recruiting two or three more and winning the thing hands down, as Trinity did just a few years later?  The answer lies, as it so often does, in Deep Throat's admonition, "Follow the money."

For many years the biggest story in collegiate squash has been, of course, the dominance of Trinity. Squash publications and newspapers like the New York Times have described the decision made by the president of Trinity and Paul Assaiante to build a championship squash team.  The purpose of this venture was to associate Trinity with the traditional champions of collegiate squash, Harvard, Princeton and Yale, as part of a broader bid to improve the standard of applicants to the college.  According to articles I've seen in the past few years, this has been successful.  It is well deserved; Trinity is a superb institution which had become temporarily less popular, partly owing to the difficulties Hartford was facing. If Squash has contributed to improving their admissions pool, well done.

The key to the strategy was foreign recruiting.  In 2011 the NY Times reported, "It has been 15 years since that short conversation, at which Dobelle gave Assaiante the go-ahead to canvass the globe for players. "   The question readers should have asked is,"Why did he need a go-ahead?"  Coaches had been recruiting foreign players for a long time, Trinity had numerous foreign students already.  

Schools in NESCAC, (Trinity's athletic conference) and the Ivy League together make up the traditional bulk of collegiate squash, though the game has expanded considerably recently.  These schools do not allow sports scholarships, and by and large they do not offer academic scholarships, though there are exceptions.  Instead they offer financial aid to ALL needy students, regardless of the reasons for which they were given admission- exceptional achievement in academics, sports, community service and so forth.  These schools do their best to be need- blind.  That is to say they do not look at how much aid an applicant will require until AFTER they have accepted them.  (In recent years, as costs have sky-rocketed, some schools have been forced to abandon this laudable goal.)  Sadly, most of these schools, Trinity included (this is clearly stated on the Trinity web site), are NOT need-blind for foreign students.  They simply cannot afford this luxury. They have to factor a foreign student's ability to pay into the equation.

Foreign students almost invariably need financial aid.  U.S. colleges and universities cost up to four times what similar institutions in other countries do.  Some countries have even had currency export restrictions. (I believe India, where so many of the early foreign squash players came from, used to.)  I have known coaches at extremely wealthy schools to be told by Admissions, "You already have one foreign player, we can't afford another."  The only "go-ahead" Dobell could have given Assaiante, who was already free to contact any student he wished,  is something along the lines of, "You find the players, and I'll figure out how to pay for them."

In the early years of Trinity's ascension I was the coach at Wesleyan.  I refused to play Trinity  on the grounds that they were offering de facto sports scholarships.  I argued to my A.D., who at first insisted I honor our contract to play, and to Paul Assaiante, that it's unfair for a school to decide that while they are not need-blind to the ordinary foreign applicant pool, they will be need-blind to foreign Squash players. My decision meant little to Trinity- they'd been thumping us for decades!  

I was never an aggressive recruiter, but I recall one day getting a letter from an overseas applicant who was a superb student and would be an instant number 1 player.  He had friends at Wesleyan and thought it would be the perfect school. I made one of my rare calls to admissions, and virtually the first words out of my contact's mouth were, "Can he pay?"  It's not that I didn't have a fine school to attract this student- I didn't have the money.  Trinity had the money. At the time I thought that was unfair, and I argued that a sensible reading of the NESCAC rules which embraced the spirit of the prohibition on athletic scholarships supported this position.   I thought that it was only because Squash was not an NCAA sport that Trinity could get way with it.  Surely if a Division III team showed up to a cross country meet with five Kenyans the NCAA would question how they payed their tuition fees.

In the two decades since, I've been proved wrong countless times in the court of public opinion, and, apparently, in the discussions of NESCAC  Athletic Directors.  I will mention, though, that 10 or 12 years ago I was at a squash related event in New York City where I heard a former Trinity player expressing his gratitude for what he called a "Squash scholarship," though he was, of course, mistaken.

Whether you call it financial aid or a Squash scholarship, the fact remains that a school that is willing to assume the financial burden can field a powerful team, and more schools are making the decision to do this.  I can't comment on their motivations, but perhaps, as Trinity did, they want to be mentioned in the same breath as the Ivies.  (Of course the Ivies are no longer necessarily the teams that they will need to conquer, and it is certainly no disrespect to Trinity to say that it doesn't carry quite the same cachet to be coupled with them as with Harvard!)  I never for a second bought Assaiante's suggestion that foreign students picked Trinity over other schools because parents trust him more than other coaches to look after their kids. It was always Financial Aid. The increasing numbers who feel safe at other schools these days seem to bear me out.  

Unlike Ted though, I think the influx of foreign players can only be good for U.S. Squash, and good for the schools they attend. As Assaiante has said on many occasions, the players are typically excellent students who feel a deep responsibility to their parents and gratitude to the school, and thus treat the team and their academics as serious enterprises, something not every young American does, (myself a particularly shameful case in point all those years ago!) Trinity's players are notable for their sportsmanship and their presentation. In addition overseas recruiting has made it possible for a variety of schools to compete at the top level, which may in time contribute to diminishing the elitist image of the sport.

Nonetheless, when I read one of those heartwarming stories of poor children from the toughest circumstances making it to an elite educational institution in the U.S. I always wonder how many more could be given that opportunity if the scant financial aid money for foreign students weren't diverted to other purposes. Don't forget that Squash is an expensive sport in most countries, we're not exactly opening doors to the needy. Of course I always used to wonder how people could oppose Affirmative Action, which aims to right an ancient and ongoing horror, but find nothing wrong with giving an admissions boost to a kid who plays a sport of which only the wealthy have even heard.