On Friday night, No. 11 men’s squash (12-6, 8-0 NESCAC) defeated the No. 16 Amherst Mammoths (11-7, 6-4 NESCAC) on the road, adding to an already spotless conference record. Despite a shaky start, the Ephs recovered decisively, showcasing impressive physical stamina and a supportive team dynamic.
Hudson Lin ’27, Alex Akbari ’26, and co-captain Andrew Minnis ’25 were first on the courts for the Ephs. While Lin and Minnis fell to the Mammoths, Akbari recovered from dropping the first game of his match, regaining focus and winning the next three. Charles Merill ’24 followed, unable to secure a win despite a commanding opening.
Fifth to play, Asher Leavy ’26 came off the court frustrated after dropping his first game by a disheartening margin. With a few words from interim coach Hesham Aly, however, Leavy was on the upswing.
“I definitely picked up the aggression,” Leavy said in an interview with the Record “I came out there ready to volley a lot more, pick up the pace, put some pressure on him, knowing that I could outlast him,” he continued.
Down 2-3 with four matches left to be decided, the Ephs were neck and neck with the Mammoths. However, adding to an already impressive first season, Nick Agger ’27 evened the score, taking three straight games by decisive margins.
By the time John Nicholson ’26 was the last Eph remaining on the court, the match had already been decided 5-3 in the Ephs favor — co-captain Will Evans ’24 and Jack Lee ’25 had broken a precarious three-all tie, securing the victory as each prevailed without dropping a game.
While the Ephs would win the match regardless, the pressure was still on for Nicholson. Earlier this year, the College Squash Association (CSA) began assigning national rankings through a new algorithm which takes into account not only whether a match was won or not by a school but the margin of the win or loss. The new algorithm proffered good news for the Ephs upon introduction a little over a week ago, bumping them up to No. 9 in the nation and placing them in the top ten for the first time in a decade.
Nicholson competed for over an hour as both teams looked on. Down 1-2 but bolstered by the cheers of his teammates against the away crowd’s intensity, Nicholson began to take charge and kept it — even as his racket broke during the deciding game. “I had to borrow someone else’s racket. But actually the racket worked really well for me,” he said, noting an improvement in his drops.
“Everybody was trying to tap into getting John to play the best squash he could — and he ultimately did,” Leavy said of the match, which brought the Ephs a 6-3 victory. “By the fifth game, he was playing the best squash we’ve seen him play.”
With an outstanding regular season behind them, the Ephs now turn their attention to end-of-season tournaments. First up is the NESCAC tournament this weekend. The team’s focus will be not only on winning when possible, but on doing so by an emphatic margin — particularly against Tufts (10-4, 6-2 NESCAC), the team’s closest NESCAC rival.
The Ephs hope to maintain or improve upon their current No. 11 ranking as they play in the NESCAC championships, as the top twelve teams nationally go on to play in the ‘A” bracket of the College Squash Association’s Championships — a competition in which they hope to turn the tables against rival, Dartmouth, whom they lost to last week by a razor-thin margin of 5-4, in a rematch. Such a win could place the Ephs in the top 10 nationally, a dream the team fell just short of last year.
Co-captains Evans and Minnis are doing all they can to make it happen this season. In the fall, the team began pre-season training around a month earlier than usual with practices organized by the two. “If we’re going to beat Dartmouth and make the top ten — which really is what it comes down to — we need to just be training harder,” Nicholson said.
While such conditioning and discipline is certainly one of the program’s strong suits, Nicholson, Leavy, and Agger all agreed such excellence was made possible by the tight-knit nature of the team. “We have a belief that we’re one of the hardest working teams in college squash and the closest and we pride ourselves on that over anything,” Leavy said. “Going in, our mentality is trusting that we were putting in the work and that we can compete with the other top teams.”
