When Stanford introduces its newest women’s varsity sport next fall, it will signify one of the most peculiar start-up stories in school history.
The sport is squash, an indoor racket game most commonly associated with “St. Grottlesex” prep schools of New England and private men’s clubs in New York and Boston. Nurtured by students as a club sport at Stanford, its ascension to varsity status resulted from a combination of audacity and serendipity. The result: spanking new facilities at the Arrillaga Center for Sports and Recreation and a man once called “the greatest American squash player in history” as the coach. The newly minted women’s team will be the only college varsity west of the Mississippi.
You’re forgiven for not knowing much about squash. It has a well-deserved reputation as a sport for the rich, and most of the courts are concentrated in the Northeast. Played with teardrop-shaped rackets and a squishy rubber ball, squash is a fast-moving, intense sport. The first player to score nine points wins, and only the player who is serving can score. A college team carries nine players, who each play a best-of-five set against an opponent.
Ten years ago, squash hardly existed on the Farm. Stanford players—Shakespeare’s Henry V might have called them the Unhappy Few—were hacking away in old-fashioned courts at the decrepit DeGuerre athletic facility. “The courts were barely functional; it was like playing in a bomb shelter,” recalls Mark Goldenson, who co-founded the Stanford Squash Club in 1999.
Goldenson, ’01, and a handful of compadres jawboned the athletic department into building two new courts at DeGuerre, then immediately trained their sights on a bigger prize. They wanted a competition-level facility like the richly endowed squash palaces at Harvard, Yale and current men’s collegiate champion Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. “We heard that [donor] John Arrillaga [’60] wanted to build a new recreation center, and we started lobbying,” Goldenson says. The so-called Squash Founders Committee deluged the athletic department with PowerPoint presentations, “needs assessments,” and data-heavy documents like a “Usage Simulation and Analysis,” which grandly assumed that there were 350 to 500 squash players at the Farm.
Their efforts earned a huge boost in summer 2004 when, for family reasons, Mark Talbott, the above-mentioned “greatest American squash player” and coach of Yale’s national champion women’s team, approached then athletic director Ted Leland, PhD ’83, about transplanting to the Left Coast. (Talbott was the world’s top-ranked player from 1983 to 1995 and an eight-time winner of the World Professional Squash Association’s Player of the Year award.) Leland agreed to elevate squash to varsity status and support it with new facilities. Stanford now has six competition-ready squash courts and a seventh, glass-walled exhibition court. And a club sport that had been wooing beginners just to field a team suddenly has legitimate aspirations to become a national contender. SquashTalk, a leading news outlet for the sport, wrote that Talbott’s “quiet insistence on excellence and proven ability to recruit” give the Cardinal “a very real opportunity to become the first major intercollegiate squash power not based on the East Coast.”
Like most Stanford players, current women’s co-captain Cate Crowley, ’06, had never touched a racket before coming to Palo Alto. She played softball in high school, but couldn’t hope to make Stanford’s top-ranked team. She signed up for squash after spotting a recruiting flyer in the Soto bathrooms.
As a freshman, Crowley studied the game by watching Talbott play on instructional videos. Now she’s exchanging rail shots—squash’s trademark wall-hugging lobs—with him. “We used to have a coach who stood in the middle of the court and talked the whole time,” Crowley recalls. “Mark coaches through example and practicing with us.”
“He loves getting on the court with us,” says former women’s captain Maisy Samuelson, ’05, one of several players who have been spotted on campus wearing an “I (heart) Mark” T-shirt. “He’s our brand,” she jokes.
Players like Samuelson and Crowley have weathered tough times on the squash circuit. Situated on the “wrong” coast, Stanford has had to scramble for opponents, playing against private schools or the few California clubs that have active programs. Twice a year they have endured grueling, three-day road trips to the East Coast, sometimes playing six matches in 48 hours. And when they arrive, they are usually crushed by squads stocked with athletes recruited from Eastern prep schools. Memorably, the women’s team once showed up to the U.S. Nationals at Yale wearing the wrong shoes. (Talbott was their host and loaned them shoes. “It was so disarming that he treated the worst team to show up at the Nationals as if we were one of the best,” Samuelson recalls.) When teased about losing to Yale’s women’s team two years ago, current men’s player Jon Levine, ’06, notes that “it wasn’t just the Yale women; we’ve lost to the Harvard and Trinity women as well.”
All that is about to change. Stanford’s men’s and women’s teams now rank somewhere between 15th and 20th among the nation’s 30-odd college programs. With Talbott at the helm, the 14-person women’s team could become a national contender in just two years. “We could be in the top five,” says Levine, who would like to see a men’s varsity team materialize, too. That isn’t very likely, as Stanford has not achieved complete gender equity in sports and is not looking to add men’s varsity teams.
Talbott is sanguine about his own future and the future of Stanford squash. His family has resettled to Palo Alto. His deal with the athletics department requires him to raise enough funds to make the squash program self-sufficient, and the money chase is going well. He has raised $500,000 and found an anonymous donor who will match any gifts up to $1 million. Talbott says he needs to nail down $2.5 million within three years to put the program on solid footing.
Talbott is confident he can build teams worthy of trophy-choked Stanford. “If I could recruit a championship team to New Haven, this should be a lot easier,” he says. “All I have to do is get people to come see this place.”
ALEX BEAM, a 1996-97 John S. Knight fellow at Stanford, writes for the Boston Globe.
