This past weekend, the Fordham squash team traveled to Philadelphia for the 2024 CSA Team Championship, competing in Group A of the Conroy Cup. The Rams suffered a tough weekend against opponents such as Vassar College, Wesleyan University and Bard College.
In total, Fordham went 1-2 across the weekend, winning fifth place in the tournament.
The weekend started off against Vassar, with the Rams winning in the third, fourth and eighth positions.
In the third position, senior Henry Frawley defeated Konstan Georgallides in three games, 11-5, 11-3 and 11-6. Sophomore Jack Stanley had an easy three game sweep to take down Luke Chen at fourth position, 11-7, 11-7 and 11-8, while junior Sofia Arseniev fought a thrilling comeback game in the fifth game in the eighth slot, defeating Kyle Benson, 4-11, 9-11, 11-7, 11-5 and 11-6.
But for the rest of the team, they were not able to get the job done as the first, second, fifth, sixth, seventh and ninth positions all dropped their matches to Vassar opponents.
Freshman Peter Vorbach fell at fifth position to Jarid Haslinger, 11-13, 11-3, 11-5 and 11-7, and junior Robert Cruikshank dropped his match up at sixth position to Razaan Lalji, 11-7, 4-11, 11-6 and 16-14.
The Rams finished the faceoff against Vassar with a final score of 3-6.
The second event of the weekend against Wesleyan was a massive struggle as the team could not get a win. They dropped all nine matches to be swept in three games each.
The closest of games came from sophomore Gray Kearns in sixth position against Wesleyan’s Preston Crawford in which Kearns was in striking distance from winning the first set, yet could not bring it home for the Rams, 11-8, 11-6.
However, things turned around for the Rams as they took on their final matchup against Bard for fifth place.
Fordham earned a point by default, putting them ahead early and giving them a strong mindset going forward into the matches. It surely helped as the Rams swept the third through eighth slots, with the Rams only conceding three games at most.
At third and fourth position Stanley and Vorbach earned two big wins, respectively. Stanley beat Will Egan at third position, 11-1, 11-2 and 11-3, while Vorbach defeated Ali Rajabi at fourth position, 11-0, 11-3 and 11-3.
Cruikshank took his fifth slot match from Ahmad Jalil, 11-1, 11-3 and 11-2, and Kearns swept Jacob Nathan at the sixth slot, 11-0, 11-1 and 11-2.
Arseniev moved to seventh position winning her matches (11-1, 11-0, 11-2) and senior Nicholas Choo at the eighth spot took home a win as well after a no decision the day before (11-1, 11-1, 11-1).
The top two positions faced a little bit of a more difficult challenge with sophomore Nicholas Gilman, downing Artemy Mukhin at first position in a five-game thriller. The sophomore battled back across five games to take home the win, 11-7, 6-11, 9-11, 12-10 and 11-6.
The second slot, occupied by Frawley, earned the team sweep of 9-0 with a three-game sweep of Luca Heidelberg, 11-4, 11-7 and 11-0.
Overall, Fordham now sits at 19-9 on the season as they have a small break before heading to the west coast for a road trip against University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles on March 2. The tournament will be held in San Diego and is the last matchup of the season before the CSA Individual/Doubles Championship.
