Wyant takes both Squash reins

After the Penn women’s squash team finished last season as the second-best in the country, Jack Wyant was confident in his ability to lead the Quakers to the highest level.

And now, after six seasons as the women’s squash team’s head coach, Jack Wyant will be called upon to turn around a men’s team that struggled last season, dropping 6 of its final 8 matches.

On August 16, athletic director Steve Bilsky announced that Wyant would fill the men’s coaching job left by the June resignation of head coach Craig Thorpe-Clark.

“The athletic department wasn’t initially thinking of combining the programs under single leadership,” Wyant said. “My sense was that they had a parallel search — they talked about me coaching both teams while interviewing a lot of other candidates at the same time.”

But given Wyant’s successful track record at Penn, he emerged as the natural choice for a team that has often been overshadowed by its female counterpart in recent years.

“[Wyant] has had a great deal of success overseeing our women’s program, and it is our hope that he can achieve similar success overseeing the men’s program,” Bilsky said in a statement.

Although he has not coached men before, Wyant is not too worried about the new challenge.

“I know all the returning players reasonably well,” Wyant said. “Craig [Thorpe-Clark] and I were good friends, and while I didn’t coach his boys and he didn’t coach the women, you get a pretty good sense for the skill level of the players.”

It also helps that Wyant has Ivy men’s squash experience himself, having played for Princeton from 1992-96. During his collegiate career, he was a three-time All-American and four-time All-Ivy selection.

Though the men's and women's programs have differing competition schedules and face different challenges from their opponents, the veteran coach already has a plan for balancing his time between the two teams.

The first step in this process was hiring a new assistant coach, former Penn standout Gilly Lane.

An All-American in each of his four years at Penn, Lane was the runner-up at U.S. Nationals in both 2009 and 2010 and three Professional Squash Association titles under his belt.

“We are [also] in the process of hiring another full-time assistant coach,” Wyant said. “Between the three coaches, we will share the responsibilities of both teams.”

Though the coaching situation may seem unorthodox to some, Wyant remains convinced that the end result will be positive.

“If you compare the new situation to the old, we will have three people dedicated to two teams as opposed to two people dedicated to two teams,” he said.

“So hopefully the resources will be increased, and we’re going to have to allocate our resources very carefully. We will do it based on how things evolve with the two teams, and based on our opponents.”

Wyant expressed clearly that when the players are on the courts, he anticipates that they will be able to handle their own specific challenges and overcome them.

“I am always going to be there for them, but I would be thrilled if we develop the type of athletes that can overcome the individual obstacles as they arise,” Wyant said.

This article has been edited from its print version to reflect that Wyant will not be the only current Penn coach to lead both a men’s and women’s program at the same time; fencing coach Andy Ma and swimming coach Mike Schnur also head both men's and women's programs.

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