Longest winning streak in history ends

Alumni NEWS

Longest winning streak in the history of team sport finally comes to an end

John Lamont 2009 with his coach,Paul Assiante

My name is John Lamont, from the Class of 2009, and I would like to describe a bit of what I have been doing since Selwyn House.

I am a squash player who pursued this sport in college after playing at a prep school called Salisbury School for two years. I was recruited to Trinity College in Hartford, and now play on its men’s team.

Until January, the Trinity men’s squash team had not been defeated in over 13 years, dating back to 1998. This team, after defeating Williams College on December 10, 2011, had the longest winning streak in the history of team sports in both collegiate and professional athletics.

The winning streak reached a total of 252 matches since 1998, and during this streak, 13 straight national championships had been won, with Trinity always holding the number-one position in the rankings.

Because squash is obviously not a household sport, and doesn’t make the news too often, this streak and success has been relatively unknown outside the northeast U.S. What makes this streak and success so special is that Trinity is a Division-3 school. But squash is not an official NCAA sport, therefore the entire College Squash Association is all one division. In this league, we compete against all the Ivy League teams, which are Division-1 schools and much larger in size. We are the only Division-3 school that can continually beat Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Cornell. ESPN, Sports Illustrated and, most recently, the New York Times have done pieces about our team.

In a college squash match, each team plays nine of its best players against another team’s nine. In order to win the entire match, a team must win at least five matches. In order to determine who plays what position, most teams use a challenge-match system in which a player must defend his position on the “ladder”.

As a freshman, I have worked my way to the number-nine position on a roster of 20+ players. I have played as high as eight, and am always looking to move higher on our ladder.

Since roughly 1997, our coach, Paul Assiante, has scouted the best international junior squash players and lured them to Trinity. That’s when the dominance started. We have had players from Pakistan, South Africa, Sweden, Colombia, Malaysia, India, Canada, Mexico, El Salvador, Botswana, Zimbabwe, England, and many more. This wave has prompted many of the Ivy League schools to do the same in order to keep up with Trinity, with the result that college squash now brings a lot of the best players in the world into it.

January 18, 2012 was a day we will never forget. We traveled down to New Haven for our night encounter against the then-number-two in the nation, the Yale Bulldogs. We were met by a raucous crowd, with fans jeering and hollering for our defeat. After the first three matches, we were up 2-1 with very tight wins and a five-game loss. In the next round, we dropped two of three, again all down to the wire and just pure battling. Sophomore Matt Mackin pulled out a crucial five-game match, involving quite a bit of referee interference and some poor calls. With the match at 3-3 in our favour, knowing we would get a definite win from our captain and number 1, Vikram Malhotra, we needed just one more win.

However, as the crowd continued to build and cram into the facility, and facing a determined Yale team, it was not going to be an easy task. Vikram won in easy fashion, but our player number 7, from El Salvador, lost a very close four-game match, which left it up to Johan Detter, a junior from Sweden famous for his lengthy matches, to close out the match. On the Yale side was Irish senior John Roberts, who never gave in to the pressure. The match hit the 90-minute mark at the fourth game, which Johan won to force it to a fifth and deciding game—winner take all. Johan gave it everything he had, but the momentum was in Roberts’ hands and he won the game 11-4. The Yale team and crowd stormed onto the court to celebrate the win, our first loss in 252 matches over a 13-year period. “The Streak” was over.

This team experienced the loss of a record that may never be broken by anyone in any sport, a streak so meaningful that ESPN dedicated a “Top Ten Streaks in Sports” segment to it.

John Lamont 2009 ■