Hall Continues Career

After turning in their theses, most seniors just want to collapse into a vegetative state and spend the next few months recovering.

Louisa Hall of the Harvard women’s squash team opted instead to travel to Seattle, Wash. and play some of her best squash of the year.

The Crimson co-captain took third in the Women’s Open round of the U.S. National Championships after dominating the current Intercollegiate champion Michelle Quibell of Yale in the third-place play-off.

Hall easily defeated Quibell 9-2, 9-6, 9-1 in a revitalized performance that bore little resemblance to her recent struggles in college play.

“There was much more energy and aggression all the way through,” said Harvard assistant coach Margaret Elias ’02, who fell to her former teammate in the quarterfinals 9-1, 9-2, 9-5. “There was a positive energy level unlike the intercollegiate [play].”

Hall’s recent intercollegiate matches had proved more taxing than one might have expected. She was only able to reach the quarterfinals of the College Squash Association Individual Championships before being upset by Trinity’s Vaidehi Reddy.

Last Saturday, however, Hall took Meredith Quick down to the wire in a five-game semifinal bout that included two come-from-behind 10-9 wins. Though she eventually succumbed to Quick 9-3, 9-10, 9-1, 9-10, 9-2, it was nevertheless a momentous performance for the Crimson’s lone senior.

“To see her dig in and fight back [from a deficit], we both felt like it was a breakthrough,” Elias said.

“I feel like I’m starting to play better again,” Hall added. “I was getting really frustrated.”

Following her semifinal defeat, Hall rebounded with her decisive victory over Quibell, to whom she had fallen twice this past season in intercollegiate play. The most recent time was a swift three-game loss in Yale’s 6-3 semifinal win over Harvard at February’s Howe Cup, where the Bulldogs went on to claim the national title. The other loss took four games in the Crimson’s 7-2 dual-match defeat earlier in the month.

“Obviously this doesn’t make for losing earlier, but I’m much happier with how I played this weekend than how I’ve been playing recently,” Hall said.

This time, Hall stayed well in control of the match, never allowing Quibell to find her rhythm.

“I’ve never seen her play so well in competition,” Elias said of Hall. “She just blew Michelle off the court—came out early, kept her dug in the back the whole time.”

The confident win may have taken some of the sting out of the close loss to Quick, according to Harvard coach Satinder Bajwa.

“Considering that towards the end she was under stress,” Bajwa said, “with that removed she most definitely played to potential, which makes up for the loss to Meredith Quick—which she could have won. Failing that, beating Michelle showed [Hall] playing all her strengths.”

Though the first round match pitted former Crimson teammates and close friends Hall and Elias against one another, both shrugged off any fuss about the match-up.

“We’ve been playing each other since we were about ten,” Hall said. “It’s not like some emotional, life-changing event.”

“I’d rather play her than a lot of people,” Elias said.”

While Hall’s career at Harvard may be over, she has no plans to stop playing squash any time soon. Both she and Elias tried out for the US Women’s National team for a chance to play in Amsterdam. Hall has also considered playing for the Pan-American team in Mexico.

“Either way, I want to keep playing squash competitively,” Hall said.

Hall was also recently named to this winter’s Ivy All-Academic team. Though she was the only women’s squash member taken, James Bullock from the men’s squad was selected too.

—Staff writer Lisa J. Kennelly can be reached at kennell@fas.harvard.edu.