By granting Tufts the final B-Division position last Monday, the College Squash Association gave the Jumbos a safety net of sorts, ensuring that they could finish the season no lower than No. 16 in the country.
The Jumbos took advantage of that safeguard at the Howe Cup in Princeton, N.J. Despite some closer-than-expected matches against a pair of heavyweights on Saturday and a close final match on Sunday, the team failed to come up with an upset and ended the weekend exactly where it started.
The Jumbos' No. 16 ranking is a marked improvement over their finish in 2006-07, when a Howe Cup roster of only seven players dropped two spots in the final weekend of the season to finish 23rd.
Tufts fell 9-0 to Williams, 8-1 to Bowdoin and 6-3 to Hamilton in consecutive matches at this past weekend's Howe Cup, the sport's de facto national championship. While the results precluded any move up in the final rankings, the Jumbos saw several bright spots in their final weekend of play.
"You want to go out playing great squash against really strong teams," senior co-captain Rebecca Rice said. "We played great squash against really competitive teams - Williams and Bowdoin are ninth and 13th in the country. That's a really solid way to end the season."
The biggest and easily the most winnable match of the weekend was the final one, Sunday's bout with Hamilton. The No. 15 Continentals were ranked just ahead of Tufts and late last month had beaten a Jumbo squad that was missing three of its top 10 players.
The Jumbos had those three players - No. 4 Laura Curren, No. 8 Margaret Fisher and No. 10 Allie Dempsey - this time, although they were without No. 6 Jessica Herrman, who had an academic commitment on campus.
"[The Hamilton] loss was the only real disappointment because we did think that we had an advantage only missing one person in our ladder as opposed to three," assistant coach Kelsey Engman said. "I do think that if Jess had been there it would have been a lot closer, but she had a very important prior engagement and we all understood that."
Wins at Nos. 3 through 5 got Tufts halfway there, and junior Caroline Choi's exhibition win at No. 10 was a nice touch, but the bottom of the roster - the Jumbos' strength this year, especially early in the season - fell short. Playing a spot higher than usual, Fisher and senior co-captain Micela Leis lost in four games each at No. 7 and No. 6, respectively, and Hamilton repeated its regular-season 6-3 win over the Jumbos.
The team's first two matches proved much tougher draws.
The Jumbos opened with a shutout loss to Williams, the B Division's top-seeded team and eventual champion, on Saturday. As with the Hamilton match, the strongest performances came from the No. 3, 4 and 5 spots, where junior Stef Marx, Curren and freshman Valeria Koo all put up fights. Curren notched eight points in the first game against junior Arianna Kourides and Koo and Marx both got seven points in a single game against their respective opponents.
"Some of the girls played the best squash they've played all season in that match," Rice said. "Williams is a really strong team with solid skills all the way through. We knew it would be a tough weekend, and to play that well in the first match set the tone for the rest of the weekend."
That afternoon, the Jumbos faced No. 12 Bowdoin, loser of a 5-4 decision to No. 13 Bates in the first round. Tufts and Bowdoin had split their two regular-season meetings, but the Polar Bear lineup that the Jumbos had beaten narrowly in early December was missing its No. 4 through 8 players and forfeited the No. 9 match.
Now at full-strength, and spurred on by their first-round loss to lower-ranked Bates, the Polar Bears swept the top eight matches. Dempsey got the Jumbos' sole victory with a five-game squeaker over sophomore Jennifer Crouch.
"A lot of those matches were competitive and the girls played well, but [Bowdoin] is a different team than the one we played at the beginning of the year and we knew that going in," Engman said. "The scores don't show how close the matches were and how well the girls played. I was really proud of them."
"We knew Williams and Bowdoin were going to be really hard but everyone really played well," junior Victoria Barba said. "Allie beat Bowdoin on Saturday which was amazing and yesterday Val, Stefanie and Laura played amazingly. And the match against Hamilton could have gone either way - we just got unlucky."
Despite their failure to advance in the rankings, 2007-2008 was a banner year for the Jumbos. Their jump from No. 23 last season - in the bottom third of the Howe Cup's lower-ranked C Division - to No. 16 this year represents the second-biggest single-season jump of any team in the nation, and the biggest within the top 20.
Rankings aside, the Jumbos that took the court this weekend represented a complete turnaround from the depleted lineup that made the trip last winter. In 2007, Tufts brought only seven players to the event; this year, even without Herrmann, the team was 13-strong and the atmosphere was one of unity and pride.
"This year, our team is much tighter-knit; the whole team supports each other, and that energy is what allowed us to do so well this year," Barba said. "Squash is an individual sport, but it's the team spirit that really carries you through and that's what this weekend was really about."
