Sasha Cooke Weighs in on the State of College Squash

In my view we've got entire teams made up of foreign recruits essentially on sports scholarships, many well past the age of ordinary college students, many of whom took as much money as they could get for their extensive pro forays.  

It's so far from the ideals of Ivy or NESCAC sports that it's unrecognizable.  

When there are abuses in NCAA football the NCAA is there to police them.  When people skirt the very limits of the rules, all the other teams have the same opportunities.  

But we have a situation where a team's success depends on the willingness of the school's administration to go outside their core mission and to pervert the souls of their institutions.

Schools that aren't willing to do this can't compete. 

As I see it, the CSA allowed a few obvious abuses 25 years ago and more, and these have metastasized so that more schools are being drawn into an unhealthy arms race.  Falsus in unum...  

The excuse in football was always that it brought in alumni dollars.  Bowen's book exploded that little myth, so no one can possibly believe it to hold true in squash.  

I have zero faith that anyone among the CSA coaches or the non-coaching members of the board can fix this because they're still not willing to say that much of what Trinity has done has been destructive of the principles under which NESCAC sports are meant to be played.  

If you try to tiptoe around Trinity and indeed celebrate their accomplishments, you simply can't address the big issues.  

Going after nickle-and-dime stuff, like a coach possibly contacting a recruit before the rules allow it (and I'm sure the current coach in question has some defense), or disciplining a player for committing an apparel violation, is like trying to cure AIDS with aspirin.  

Again, at least in football you have thousands at the games and it's a hundred year old tradition to have homecoming games for all alumni.  It's even a hundred year old tradition to have recruiting excesses.  

That doesn't make them right, but it makes them understandable.  Squash was the Girls' Egg and Spoon, and now we've got Jim Brown out there with his thumb on the egg.