I am greatly saddened as well. While I was an active player, even living clear across the country, I was able to feel his influence.
John
Born on June 18, 1952, Dave Talbott grew up in Dayton, Ohio, in a house that had a tennis court on the property and a hardball squash court in the basement. One had to go through a room in the house’s lower level called The Cabin that had stuffed animals and muskets hanging from the walls, then climb down a ladder with a pulley to enter the court and push the ladder back up so that it wouldn’t interfere with the play. He was a finalist in the 1969 New England Interscholastic Championships during a two-year stint at Deerfield Academy that was highlighted by an 18-17 fifth-game win in the dual meet with Exeter against Dave Fish, who as Harvard’s squash coach from 1976-89 would be Talbott’s opposite number during six years’ worth of Harvard-Yale squash match-ups. In the years that followed, Talbott was the head squash pro at some top-echelon private clubs and played with distinction for several years on the WPSA tour (earning a top-15 ranking and scoring several wins over players in the top 10), which he served as secretary and later as pro tour coordinator during the vital early-1980’s period in that Association’s development.
Appointed the successor to outgoing coach Steve Gurney in August 1983, just a few weeks before the fall semester began, Talbott left his position as head pro at the Detroit Athletic Club after five enjoyable years there to launch what the Yale Athletic Department hoped would be a resurgence of the program, which had not won an Intercollegiate team championship since 1961, when the Elis had had their last undefeated season and conquered Harvard for the final time. Realizing from very early on that there was a need to enhance Yale’s heretofore understated profile on the squash map, Talbott immediately in the fall of 1983 inaugurated the Yale Open as an early-season tournament on the USSRA schedule that would bring highly ranked players to Payne Whitney and give his own varsity valuable match experience against them. Talbott also arranged to have Yale host a WPSA ranking tourney for several years as part of the Yale Open weekend, and he and Gurney oversaw a renovation and expansion of the courts, by the end of which Yale had arguably the premier squash facility in the nation. His own well-known prowess as a solid WPSA player benefited him in this undertaking, as did his engaging personality and Mark’s growing fame.
By the third season of Talbott’s tenure, his efforts had begun to show some genuine signs of the glory that awaited the program he was heading. Yale went 11-3 during that 1985-86 season, whose foremost feature was the remarkable mid-season surge of senior Hugh Labossier, the Yale captain that year, who defeated Jeff Stanley and Kenton Jernigan, the No. 1 players at archrivals Princeton and Harvard respectively, in the semis and final of the U.S. Nationals at the University Club Of New York to thereby become the first-ever Yalie to win this championship while still an undergraduate.
Three years later the Bulldogs, paced by sophomore No. 1 John Musto and a host of talented upperclassmen, finished in a three-way tie for first place in the Ivy League and --- having won 7-2 over a Princeton team that had already beaten Harvard 8-1 --- would have been outright 1989 Ivy League champions for the first time since 1961 had they not suffered a 6-3 road loss to a Harvard team that was inspired by the prospect of giving Dave Fish a final victory in the last dual meet of his squash coaching career. (Fish would remain in Cambridge as the Crimson tennis coach until finally retiring in 2018 after 42 years in that role.)
The Yale players responded to this setback by battering Harvard 7-2 only a few days later in the semis of the inaugural edition of the Potter Cup (an elimination tournament among the top-eight-ranked teams to determine the men’s national team champion) held at Yale, then topped Princeton by the same score in the final. The 1989-90 team, led by Musto and five seniors (captain Cyrus Mehta, Alex Dean, Jim “Tuffy” Kingsbury, Jeff Hoerle and Chris Hunt), recorded the only wire-to-wire undefeated season compiled by a Yale men’s squash team in the 62-year period since 1961.
Their spotless performance was highlighted by a pair of closely-spaced (during a four-day period) 5-4 dual-meet and Potter Cup final-round victories over Harvard in which sophomore Garrett Frank saved triple-match-point against him at a time when Harvard had already notched four team points in the Potter Cup and Musto overcame imposing late-match deficits in both of his matches with Harvard No. 1 Mark Baker. The undisputed champions were feted at a victory party hosted that spring by the Yale Club Of New York, whose A team (on which Tom Clayton, Yale’s captain one year earlier, played an important role) had just gone undefeated in the highly competitive MSRA A League as well. All five varsity members from the senior class of 1990 were named co-recipients of the Skillman Cup, a kind of season-end MVP award, which had never previously been bestowed on more than one person, in recognition of the enormous contribution they had made, both individually and as a quintet, to the storied tradition of Yale squash. And Talbott, who had waited seven years to drink championship champagne, celebrated this coaching accomplishment that spring by winning the WPSA Legends (35-and-over) title at the Winter Garden in New York, defeating Sharif Khan in the semis and Charlie Khan in the final, in each case in convincing fashion. Overall, during the period from 1987-94, the last seven years in which intercollegiate squash was played with the hardball, the Elis compiled a staggering record of 108-9, were 17-0 in 1989-90 and had three other seasons (’89, ’92 and ’94) in which their only loss was to Harvard.
It took a number of transitional years for Yale to acquire both the facilities and players to again become a contending team in the wake of the switch to softball, but two major expansions --- spearheaded sequentially during the late 1990’s by Theodore P. Shen ’66 and Nicholas F. Brady, captain of Yale’s intercollegiate champion 1951-52 squash team and later Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Ronald Reagan and the senior George Bush --- resulted in the impressive presence of 15 top-of-the-line international courts, including one four-glass-wall court, two three-glass-wall courts and 12 glass-back-wall courts. The arrival in September 2002 of Julian Illingworth --- a two-time US National Junior champion whose sparkling Yale career would include an advance to the 2005 US Intercollegiate final and the first two of a record-shattering EIGHT consecutive US National Championships during his junior and senior years --- keyed a Yale resurgence during the first decade of the 2000’s that was highlighted by a three-way tie for first place in 2006 and the outright Ivy League pennant in 2010, following which Yale advanced to its first Potter Cup final since the 1990 championship run.
Also during that decade, as noted, Mark Talbott led the Yale women’s team to the 2004 Howe Cup championship when freshman Kate Rapisarda outlasted Trinity College’s Fernanda Rocha to give the Elis their clinching fifth point. When Mark Talbott then decamped for the west coast, Dave Talbott became the coach of both the men’s and women’s teams (a double-role he has held ever since) and the Yale women’s team, led by Michelle Quibell (the Intercollegiate Individual champion in 2004 and 2005) and her fellow 2006 classmate Amy Gross, ran off successful Howe Cup defenses in both 2005 and 2006. Fittingly, Quibell and Gross finished off their matches almost simultaneously after Trinity College had taken a 4-3 lead in the 2006 final. Later that year, Dave Talbott was awarded the prestigious President’s Cup by U.S. Squash (the renamed version of the USSRA) “to the person who has made substantial, sustained and significant contributions to the game of squash,” which had been bestowed on Mark Talbott 17 years earlier in 1989, marking the only time that two members of the same family have received this award.
Five years later, in 2011, Yale squash almost achieved a Potter/Howe Cup “double” when the women’s team capped off an undefeated campaign with a 5-4 final-round Howe Cup win over Harvard (with freshman Kimberley Hay winning the deciding match over Harvard No. 4 June Tiong) and the Yale men’s team led Trinity College, the reigning 12-time defending champions, four matches to two in the Potter Cup final. After Trinity had tied the score, the national championship also came down to the No. 4 match between Yale’s Richard Dodd and Trinity’s Chris Binnie, who prevailed in four games, the first three of which were all decided by 11-9 scores.
The following year, Yale ended a Trinity consecutive-matches-won streak that had swollen to an incredible 252 straight, but injuries befell the Yalies during the next few weeks, resulting in a rare first-round elimination in that year’s Potter Cup tournament. But one student generation later, Talbott’s troops stormed undefeated through the Ivy League schedule and avenged a 5-4 regular-season loss to Rochester by edging the Yellow Jackets (semis winners over Trinity) 5-4 in the Potter Cup final when Yale No. 4 Kah Wah Cheong outplayed Tomotaka Endo, 11-8 in the fourth, in the last match on court, reversing their dual-meet result six weeks earlier. Yale’s superior depth that day resulted in five wins in the Nos. 4-9 slots that nullified Rochester’s sweep of the top three positions.
During Talbott’s tenure at Yale, both Miranda Ranieri and Millie Tomlinson (in 2008 and 2011 respectively) joined Quibell as Intercollegiate Individual champions; the men’s team won the College Squash Association (CSA) team sportsmanship award in 1986, 1989 and 1994; four of his players (Labossier in 1986, Roger Arjoon in 1995, Nikhil Bhandare in 1999 and Spencer Lovejoy in 2020) won the Skillman Award, the main men’s senior award for sportsmanship combined with a high level of play; and six of his players (Frances Ho, Quibell, Catherine MacLeod and Ranieri from 2005-08, along with Alia Aziz in 2010 and Logan Greer in 2011), won the Betty Richey Award, the women’s counterpart to the Skillman Award. The four-straight Betty Richey run is a record with room to spare, since no other school has had winners of this award more than two years in a row.
Talbott’s teams were noteworthy both for the good sportsmanship implicit in all those Skillman and Richey selections and for truly being TEAMS; anyone who was around Yale squads during any portion of his prolonged tenure came away from that exposure profoundly impressed by the level of camaraderie that existed among its members, and several opposing coaches cited the degree to which this quality caused Yale’s teams to have a whole that was much more than the sum of its parts.
Talbott also played a major role in the growth of Squash Haven, New Haven’s urban youth organization under the Squash & Education aegis, whose student-athletes have used Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium squash courts and whose mission Talbott has supported since Squash Haven’s inception in 2007.
Talbott and Quibell were both inducted into the CSA Hall of Fame in the same ceremony in the spring of 2019. All in all, Talbott-coached Yale teams won a total of three Potter Cups (1989, 1990 and 2016), six men’s Ivy League pennants (1989, 1990, 2006, 2010, 2011 and 2016), four of them outright and two shared, three Howe Cups (2005, 2006 and 2011) and women’s Ivy League titles in 2005 and 2011. In the wake of Talbott’s retirement announcement, Victoria Chun, Yale’s Director of Athletics, praised him for leaving “an indelible mark of countless student-athletes that have come through the Brady Squash Center,” and declared, “Dave has built two storied programs that will continue to have success, but we will miss his enthusiasm, energy and ability to bring out the best in those he is around."
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