Athletics
Squashing the Competition Gilman’s varsity squash team makes it mark at home and beyond.
david rosenfeld
On a cold mid-winter day at Yale University, the Gilman varsity squash team won a hard-fought 5-2 decision against Westminster School to earn a top-seven finish in the US Squash High School Team Championships. Seven Gilman boys, five of whom were seniors, happily piled back into the van for the long drive back to Baltimore. Their counterparts from Westminster had a shorter drive home, about an hour. At the top of their bucolic 230-acre campus sits the Kohn Squash Pavilion — eight international courts with separate balconies and a central viewing gallery that one professional player has called “one of the finest squash facilities in the world.” The 2010–11 Gilman squash team was one of the best sports teams the School has ever assembled, more than worthy of competing against the other 15 best teams in the country. Yet it had little in common with any of those teams. Most of them are boarding schools, such as Westminster or Brunswick School, which Gilman also nearly beat. The eventual national champion and Gilman’s
quarterfinal opponent, Episcopal Academy from Philadelphia, has 10 glass-walled courts on campus and an alumnus who won the national collegiate championship in 2011. “These teams have their own courts. We don’t have them,” says Boo Smith ’70, Gilman’s coach. “Squash has been bred into those communities for a long time. They regularly send their best players to the top colleges.” For the first time in the short history of the squash program, Gilman can say the same thing about its best players. Seniors Taylor Tutrone and David Hoffman, the top two in Gilman’s lineup for four years, will both play for Princeton next season. The Tigers are perennially among the top three finishers at the national championships. Last fall, Jay Brooks ’10 made the team at Harvard as a freshman despite learning the game just four years ago. Tutrone, Hoffman and Michael East ’13 also happened to be three of the top 10 ranked high school squash players in 2010–11, stunning for a team that’s only been in existence since 1998 and uses the
spring 2011
57