Men's Squash Drops Tight Contest Against No.5 Rochester

While most people spent their Saturday getting ready for and weathering the snow storm, the No. 3 Harvard men’s squash team (2-3, 2-1 Ivy League) rounded out its home streak with a game against No. 5 Rochester (5-2). The Crimson lost in a close 5-4 decision to the Yellowjackets, ending its stretch at the Murr Center with a two-win, two-loss split.

Harvard entered the game poised to rebound from its loss last week against St. Lawrence, while Rochester looked to avenge a first round CSA championships loss to the Crimson and continue its Ivy sweep after a pair of weekend wins against No. 8 Columbia and No. 2 Yale, in which the team dealt Yale its first loss of the season.

“We were feeling confident and prepared.” freshman Alexi Gossett said. “Rochester is one of the best teams right now and they'd come off a good win against Yale, so we knew we would have a tough match.”

With the game against No. 10 Franklin and Marshall planned for Sunday cancelled due to snowstorm Jonas, the Crimson was able to focus all its energy on Saturday’s game.

It was a hard fought game on the courts, with over half of the matches being played to four or five games. Harvard took an early lead with three wins in the first four matches. Sophomore Mandela Patrick earned the first win of the day with a 11-7, 11-8, 12-10 sweep of Rochester’s Rodrigo Porras in the ninth position.

At the No. 6 position, junior co-captain Devin McLaughlin remained undefeated on the season with another 3-0 sweep of Michelangelo Bertocchi, holding him to under eight points each game. His fellow co-captain Bryan Koh avoided a sweep to win 3-2 at the No. 3 position. After losing two close games against Neil Cordell, Koh won three straight. With this win Koh improves to 4-1 on the season.

“As a team, we battled in every match and were leading for much of the way,” Gossett said. “Bryan had a huge win at the number 3 position coming back from 2 games (or sets) down to set the tone.”

The Yellowjackets began to rally after this first wave of matches, and went on to win two of the following three matches. Junior Dylan Murray fell to Lawrence Kuhn at the No. 5 position in a 3-0 sweep. Sophomore Bradley Smith, playing at the No. 2 position, took the first game 11-7, but dropped the next three 5-11, 8-11, 6-11 against CSA first team All-American Ryosei Kobayashi, who improved to 5-1 on the season.

Freshman Seif Eleinen earned the last Crimson win of the day. He continued his undefeated streak with a 3-1 decision over Rochester’s Ben Pitfield in the eighth position. Gossett lost a hard-fought 3-1 match at the No. 7 position, falling 10-12, 5-11, 11-8, 7-11 to Aria Fazelimanesh.

At the fourth position, sophomore Madhav Dhingra, who had battled a virus all week, played a marathon match against Rochester’s Tomotaka Endo. Dhingra took the first game, winning by just two points, but dropped the next two. The fourth game was a thriller, with Dhingra coming out on top 16-14 to tie the match at two apiece. The deciding game was a quick one, with Dhingra falling 5-11.

With the game tied at four matches, it came down to the game at the No. 1 position to decide the winner. Sophomore David Ryan, who looked to rebound from his first loss of the season last week, had his work cut out for him against Rochester’s other first team All American, Mario Yanez. Ryan ended up being swept by Yanez, though all three games were hard fought and the first and third games were lost by a margin of just two points.

“I think overall we are getting better week by week,” Koh said. “We started the season off not as well as we wanted to, and since then we’ve been getting better every week. So I think for training we’re just going to prepare as we would as usual….and then then hopefully apply those to our matches.”

–Staff writer Katherine Scott can be reached at katherinescott@college.harvard.edu.