W. Squash seeks vengeance on first opponent of Howe

After a historic season which saw the Penn women's squash team soar as high as No. 4 in the Squashtalk.com rankings, the Quakers' opponent at this weekend's Howe Cup will not be anything new. The Quakers will face No. 4 Dartmouth, who defeated the Red and Blue in a 5-4 thriller last weekend at the Ringe Squash courts, seizing Penn's ranking and dropping the team to No. 5 nationally. "We think we can win this time around," nationally-ranked No. 2 Runa Reta said, adding that Penn is "looking at [the match] as an opportunity to get back at them." "I hope everyone on the team remembers [last weekend]," Penn junior No. 9 Dafna Wegner said. "Because I'm anxious to get our revenge and beat Dartmouth." "They just wanted to win more than us [last time]," she added. The Howe Cup, the national championship of women's college squash, is being contested this year at the Brady Squash Center at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. "This is the perfect opportunity to show what we can do," nationally-ranked No. 15 Linda McNair said. "We have a different attitude going into [this weekend], which will make a significant difference." This weekend will be somewhat bittersweet for Reta in particular, as it is the final match of her career as a member of the Red and Blue (9-4, 3-3 Ivy). "It's a little sad because I guess it's my last tournament," Reta said. But she refused to dwell on the subject, quickly adding that the team is "definitely excited" to start competing at the Howe Cup. The top eight teams in the country will travel to the Howe Cup. Penn will be joined in the sport's upper echelon by Trinity, Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, Williams, and Brown. "It basically determines your national ranking [for the year]," Reta said. "Everything we've played up until now has been really to determine our seedings [in the Howe Cup]," McNair said. "The only thing that's going to matter is how we do this weekend." "It's definitely not just another match, another weekend," Wegner said. "We're going to have three hard matches in one weekend. It's hard to be ready day after day." The Brady Squash Center will also host the other 21 teams in the NISRA rankings this weekend. These teams will be broken into three tiers, each of which will play their own tournament. The ninth through 16th-ranked teams will contest the Kurtz Cup; the next eight will play for the Walker Cup, and the final five will chase the Epps Cup. Penn has played teams in all three tiers, or "flights," this season. The tournament is played in a double-elimination style, so if Penn loses its first match, its time in New Haven is not over. A win would likely have them playing No. 2 Harvard or the host No. 3 Elis. "Every team we lost to," Wegner said, "we can get revenge and beat them."

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