Paul Assaiante - Run to the Roar: Coaching to Overcome Fear

Table of Contents

ALSO BY JAMES ZUG

The Last Voyage of Captain Cook: The Collected Writings of John Ledyard (ed.)

To Matthew, Scott, and Kristen, who taught me that love is unconditional

22 February 2009

COURT ONE

#3. Manek Mathur (senior; Mumbai, India)

#2. Gustav Goose Detter (senior; Malmo, Sweden)

#1. Baset Ashfaq (junior; Lahore, Pakistan)

COURT THREE

#6. Supreet Singh (junior; Mumbai, India)

#5. Randy Lim (sophomore; Penang, Malaysia)

#4. Parth Sharma (sophomore; Jaipur, India)

COURT FIVE

#9. Rushabh Roosh Vora (senior; Mumbai, India)

#8. Vikram Malhotra (freshman; Mumbai, India)

#7. Andres Vargas (sophomore; Bogot, Colombia)

INJURED Chris Binnie (sophomore; Kingston, Jamaica)

Over and over theyve tried itthey being entire regiments of television producers, directors, lighting technicians, fiber-optic engineers, robot software gurus, computer swamis, grips, gaffers, and construction crewsover and over theyve tried to turn squash, the racquet sport, into TVisible entertainment. Ive seen them. They love the idea! The possibilitiesinfinite! Squash is the fastest intercollegiate sport in the world, if you consider defense as well as offense. Baseballs fastest pitcher, Nolan Ryan, could throw the ball a shade above a hundred miles an hour. Tennis fans gasped when Pete Sampras hit 130 mile-an-hour serves. But professional and Division I college squash players routinely hit a ball just 1inches in diameter 160 miles an hour or more. They rocket it into ricochets off any or all of four walls plus the floor inside a two-story enclosure, creating bewildering trajectories. What with the bursts of speed, the lunges, and abrupt changes in direction required to defend against such shots, the top players wind up with thighs as massive as a speed skaters or a racing cyclists. They have to have the aerobic fitness of boxers and Olympic wrestlers, since a one-on-one squash match can go on at top speed for two hours. Soccer players? Compared to squash players, soccer players spend most of their time on the field loitering... expertly, of course.

Sadly, I have also seen our TV troops as they straggle home after the fray... eyebrows lowered and wrapped around the nose... ditches down the middle of the forehead... mumbling... defeated by the very thing they came to capture: the speed, strength, and gymnastic bravura of the players, the velocity of that damnable little ball, the dizzying ricochets... these three, all at once... demanding purple-dimension jumps from one camera to another camera to another camera and another camera and anotherat a speed that baffles even the best TV sports directors.

The absence of the TV eye has largely spared squash from TV sports three STDiseased, shanks-akimbo harlots: Cheating, Gambling, and Greed. Greed? Theres no money in squash! None! Top-ten squash professionals fly to major international tournaments in herd class, at brain-grating off-peak hours, no-food flights, aboard AAAs (Almost An Airline) on the order of Aeroflot, Song Air, and Carnival.

But the TV darkness has also deprived millions of sports fans of the most astounding story they have never heard... the story of the hottest and statistically most successful American college coach everby farPaul Assaiante, and the dynastythe most omnipotent in the history of intercollegiate sportshe has created at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

As I write, he and his boys are riding the crest of twelve straight undefeated seasons and twelve straight Division I national championships. Their won-lost record over that stretch is 224-0. No other team in any college sport has ever come close. The second-longest streak is the University of Miami tennis teams 137 straight half a century ago.

In the pages before us Paul Assaiante tells the Trinity saga himself. Before I knew it, I was devouring it in job lots. Run to the Roar is one of those rare sports books, like Michael Lewiss Moneyball, that quite effortlessly starts you thinking about life far beyond the confines of the sport itself. Assaiante provides a lesson in twenty-first-century global psychology. He describes how he turned athletes from nineteen countries and every continent on the globe except for Antarctica, all of them ambitious and many of them hot-dogging egotists, into brotherly loving, team-spirited, one-for-all-and-all-for-one creatures within their own ranks... and implacable warriors on the court.

This sweet science, as it were, was the outcome of a single, simple, direct order. One day in 1996, Trinitys then-president Evan Dobelle called Assaiante into his officethey barely knew each otherand said, with very little backstory, I want you to go forth and assemble a squash team that can compete with the Ivy Leaguers. At the time Harvard, Yale, and Princetonespecially Harvarddominated the sport. The meeting lasted all of two minutes.