It’s still two weeks until the first squash match of the season, but already four members of the team — Jim Bristow, Beni Fischer, Andres Duany and myself — traveled to Richmond, VA, to compete in a preseason invitational tournament last weekend.

The tournament has been running for the past 39 years and the goal of the organizers has always been to invite the top 16 players in college squash to compete against each other. Although Trinity College (the team that has won the national title for the past 11 years) didn’t send anyone this year, there were still 6 All-Americans in the tournament. Taking that into consideration, it is quite impressive that four players from the UR were invited.

This was an individual tournament, but as we‘re playing Princeton already in five weeks we all were particularly looking forward to challenging the three Princeton players at the tournament. Although every one of us came extremely close to beating them, they were still a step ahead — especially on “big points.”

Andres lost in the first round against Princeton’s Todd Harrity. Harrity is a freshman but will most likely play in the 1 or 2 spot for Princeton this year. Beni and I reached the quarter-finals, both of us losing against players from Princeton too. I lost against Harrity in five (12-10 in the fifth) and Beni lost to Dave Letourneau in four. Jim went on to reach the semi-finals but he also lost against Letourneau — believe it or not, 12-10 in the fifth).

It is obviously good to know that we’re right up there with Princeton, but the fact that they were able to win all of the “big points” this weekend shows us that we still need to work on our squash before the match in December. If we can turn around those points and win the matches, we definitely have a shot at beating them.