When I think back on my squash career, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t a specific match. It’s the people—the coaches who pushed me when I didn’t want to be pushed, the teammates who became my second family, and the small, ordinary moments around the courts that somehow ended up mattering most.
My first week on campus, I remember stepping into preseason training and realizing very quickly that Hotchkiss squash was going to ask more of me than anything I had done before. The intensity of the conditioning, the standards the older players set, the way everyone seemed to take the sport seriously without taking themselves too seriously—it was overwhelming in the best way. I was tired, sore, and a little intimidated, but I also knew within a few days that I had walked into something special.
I remember playing a drill with two of my teammates we like to call three’s, where we rotate players and play points until one of us reaches 15. When I walked out and checked my WHOOP strain, I saw that I had spent 20 of the 25 minutes of the game in zone five, with my heart rate averaging well above 170 bpm. This is the training I am grateful for, as it motivated me to work harder and cultivated my sense of discipline.
The highs were unforgettable. Winning Nationals stands out as the proudest moment of my athletic career—not because of the trophy, but because of what it felt like to look around the team afterward and realize what we had just done together. That last point Simrith Gaddam ’28 won, rushing onto the courts, the cheers and the yells it was a feeling I will carry with me long after I leave this campus.
The lows shaped me just as much. Losing in a close final last year. was, at the time, devastating. What I didn’t see at the moment was that the loss would teach me more about competing—and about myself—than the wins ever did. Even though we lost, we didn’t let that get us down. Instead, we used that as fuel for this year and our grind paid off. The injuries were their own kind of low—the shin splints, the sprained ankles, all of them. Being on the sideline when you desperately want to be on court is a particular kind of helplessness, and learning to stay a good teammate while not playing turned out to be one of the harder lessons of my career.
The memories I will keep closest, though, are the smaller ones. At the Woodlands dinner this year, the team felt less like a roster and more like a family sitting around a long table. The paper plate awards at the end of the season and the runs to the farm at the start. The off-season hangouts that had nothing to do with squash and staying in touch over breaks turned teammates into the kind of friends I know I’ll have for the rest of my life.
To my coaches: Bobby, Abdul, Sandeep, Coach Clark, thank you for believing in me before I knew how to believe in myself, for the corrections that stung in the moment and made sense a year later, and for caring about who we were becoming as much as how we were playing.
To my teammates: you are the reason I love this sport. You made the hard practices bearable, the wins meaningful, and the losses survivable. I’m going to miss running drills with you more than I can put into words. Squash at Hotchkiss gave me a national title, a few scars, a handful of lessons I am still unpacking, and a group of people I will never stop being grateful for.
