By Dan Blumenthal
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Bernardo Samper (Above) and Nadeem Osman (Middle) are just two of the international players on Trinity College's men's team. Not only does Trinity field a large group of international recruits, but many of today's squash teams are looking outside the US borders for top softball squash talent. (Photos courtesy Trinity College)
As a boy growing up in South Africa, Nadeem Osman knew very little about the United States.
Even as a bright high school student and an exceptional young squash talent, Osman hardly thought about attending college in America. “I had no idea that they had squash in America,” he recalls. The Port Elizabeth native first learned about the collegiate circuit through a South African friend who had already been in touch with a Trinity college coach. After chatting with his friend about the Trinity program, Osman logged on to his high school computer and zipped out an email to Trinity Coach Paul Assaiante indicating his interest in learning more about the Hartford, Connecticut, program. Assaiante immediately asked Loua Coutzee, a fellow South African squash player already enrolled at the university, to watch Osman play, to get a better sense of whether he could compete at the college level. “Coutzee was impressed with my game, Paul asked me to apply for January admissions, and I was accepted.” Osman says. The rest is history. Right? Not quite.
Osman had an immediate and decisive impact on college squash’s most intense rivalry, Trinity-Harvard. A little over one month into his freshman year, Osman found himself playing in the rubber match of the 2000-2001 team national championships against Harvard. With Trinity and Harvard deadlocked at 4-4, he pulled out a huge five-game win, giving Trinity its second outright national championship in as many years and making the defeat doubly difficult for the Harvard team to bear. “The five-four victory was tough. We bridged the gap with what we had, and yet we lost because Trinity brought in [Osman] in January. And it hurt even more because I had been recruiting [Osman],” says Harvard Coach Satinder Bajwa.
While Harvard was Osman’s first choice, Trinity admitted him in December, inviting the South African to enroll fulltime in January. The Trinity senior never even applied to Harvard because Trinity admitted him before his Harvard application was due. As Osman recalls, he “was a little bit late in applying for January admission, but Paul had already talked to Admissions about it, and pushed the application through. Whatever happens, I just wanted to get to America,” he says. “As much as I would have liked to go to Harvard, I thought, “I’ve been accepted, and if I turn Trinity down, what then?’ I didn’t even know the difference between Harvard and Trinity before I got to America,” Osman says.
“This [college admissions] is not a process that flows, especially for foreign applicants. It has huge hurdles,” Assaiante says. Indeed, from looking at Trinity college’s lineup over the last six seasons, however, one would seem right to think that Assaiante has perfected his hurdling technique.
The Evolution of International Recruiting
The move to softball at the beginning of the 1994-1995 season proved to be the turning point for college coaches interested in bringing more international players to the States to play college squash. Knowing that the internationals could come to college and keep playing the same softball game that they had grown up on, coaches were more eager to look abroad for squash talent after the switch. Since then, recruiting rivalries between coaches for a small pool of athletically and scholastically gifted foreign students have become much more intense. “We’re competing with each other all the time, we’re constantly talking, constantly seeing who’s looking at whom, who might come to the States, who has good boards,” says Yale Coach Dave Talbott. All college coaches, Talbott not the least of them, are checking out the international squash scene with vigor and intensity: they’re making more phone calls than ever before to foreign-born professionals, squash club pros and college alums living abroad, probing them for any information that they might have about young, up-and-coming squashies in their native lands.
(To read the complete story, please see January 2003’s Squash Magazine.)
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