By David Potter
It has been a very good year for the University of York Squash Club. Lets start with the high points, our Men’s 1sts started the season very strongly and kept up the momentum to finish second in their league. They missed out on promotion in the penultimate match of the year away at Northumbria. Despite the bitter disappointment of losing out on promotion the team demonstrated a massive improvement on the previous season and proved themselves as one of the dominant teams in the league. Our Ladies 1sts had an even more impressive season, finishing just one point behind the eventual league winners Leeds, and reaching the final of the Northern Conference Cup was an incredible achievement in its own right. Under the solid captaining of Hannah Sewell the team showed a great work rate and team spirit to earn their success.
Our Men’s 2nds had a hard season season and despite some superb performances from first years Jon Perrols and Nanz Dixit, were unable to keep up their consistency and a couple of disappointing results led to them finishing at the bottom of their league.
At last year’s Roses the York squash team smashed the competition winning all the available points and losing only one match against Lancaster. Quite frankly we’re expecting more of the same this year except this time we don’t even plan to drop one match.
Overall our teams are much stronger this year than last, we have been very fortunate to have welcomed some very talented freshers into our squad such as Ed ‘the Cannon’ Shannon who slotted straight into the 1st seed position. The second team has also benefited from some very good players even though this wasn’t enough to save them from relegation. Furthermore, many of the existing players have really stepped up to the plate and have made remarkable improvements over the season, most notably, Myles ‘dark’ Knight, Sam Westmoorland and Rizuan Azhar to name but a few.
All in all, the University of York can rely on their squash teams to do their part in this year’s Roses and contribute to what we hope will be another victorious year for York.
I expect most of our Men’s 1st team to win 3-0. Our Ladies 1st should all win but by closer margins. Our seconds will have a hard time so I expect a few tight 3-2 matches. We should all win though.