By Chris McClintick
Just over a month after the passing of Princeton Coach Bob Callahan, it was apt that the nation’s top players congregated on the same hallowed courts beneath Jadwin Gymnasium that Callahan nurtured generations of collegiate and junior squash talent.
The U.S. Junior Championships, restricted to the top thirty-two ranked boys and girls in the U11, U13, U15, U17, and U19 divisions, has always served as a litmus test for the state of junior squash.
The 2015 National Juniors reflected junior squash’s growth over the past decade with the number of junior tournament players increasing 154%, resulting in an increasingly competitive and diversified field.
From 2010-2013, the number of west coast tournaments has increased by an average of fifty percent each year, a figure that came to fruition this year at National Juniors. For the first time, more players have qualified for nationals from the California bay area (twenty-six) than from the squash hotbed of Boston (twenty-one).
The Bay Club of Santa Clara alone produced both boys U11 finalists, Varun Chitturi and champion Mukunth Gopalakrishnan, while further north, the Bay Club Redwood Shores, boasted the boys U13 and U15 William T. Ketcham, Jr. Most Improved Player Award recipients, Shivin Kumar and Udai Pal respectively.
While emerging regions have increased their presence on the highest junior national stage, established clubs in traditional hotbeds have unsurprisingly continued to churn out high caliber players.
Led by former world No. 1 and U.S. National Team Coach Natalie Grainger, twenty Chelsea Piers Connecticut players yielded more finalists than any other school or club, including BU15 champion Ian Blatchford, GU13 champion Marina Stefanoni, GU13 finalist Nina Mital, and GU11 finalist Lucie Stefanoni. Philadelphia’s Fairmount Athletic Club also had strong representation on the honor roll between BU19 champion Sean Hughes, surprising unseeded GU15 champion Meghna Sreedhar, GU17 finalist Elle Ruggiero, and two Ketcham winners in GU11 Devon Glaser and GU13 Kristen Weil.
As has often been the case with squash in the United States, the sport can be a familial affair. The dominant Sobhy dynasty now graduates from junior to collegiate with Sabrina’s final junior tournament, and also collegiate to professional with Amanda’s first tournament as a full-time professional in the form of Nationals in Charlottesville.
In Princeton, the GU11, GU13, and BU13 finals involved the Stoltz and Stefanoni siblings from Bronxville, New York, and Darien, Connecticut, respectively. In the GU11 final, Molly Stoltz defeated the aforementioned, younger Stefanoni sister, Lucie. Molly’s older brother, Conner, took the BU13 title, the first siblings to win junior national titles in the same year since Charles and Caroline East in 2013. Lucie’s older sister, Marina, continued her recent vein of impeccable form that has included U.S., Scottish, French, and Canadian junior open titles, claiming the GU13 title without dropping a game.
In what is surely a first for the sport, and perhaps many other individual sports, one family fielded two sets of identical twins and, though this had happened in past years, both sets met each other in the main draw in the same junior national championships for the first time this year. Such was the incredible circumstance for the Aube family.
In the GU15 draw, unseeded Claire Aube upset her top-seeded sister, Haley, in the second round, while brothers William and Andrew Aube faced off in the all-important semifinal stage of the BU13 semifinals.
As is always the case, the parity in talent throughout all draws produced many upsets, emphasizing the competitiveness of U.S. junior squash at the highest level. Both U19 finals reflected this in the most entertaining fashion possible with Reeham Sedky defeating three-time defending champion Sabrina Sobhy for the first time since the 2012 U.S. Junior Open in five games. The Sean Hughes and Timmy Brownell rivalry continued in the BU19 final in yet another five-game affair, with Hughes claiming the title over top-seeded Brownell.
One of many upsets, and the closest to home, was produced by Princeton-native Wil Hagen, who defeated third-seeded Bransten Ming in the second round of the BU19’s on the first day of play Friday, while wearing a Bob Callahan shirt.
Callahan smiled down on his former camper that day, and celebration of squash alike that weekend.
